What to Do When Each Department Uses Different Words to Describe the Same Thing
We’ve all experienced some this problem: Ask a question to three different departments, and you get three different answers. The problem arises because different systems employ different definitions of key terms. The term “customer,” for instance, can mean a potential buyer to the marketing department, the person who signed the purchase order to sales, and the legal entity that it bills to accounting. But when this happens, people misunderstand the data and make mistakes.
Specialized vocabularies develop in the business world every day to support new or specialized disciplines, departments, problems, and innovative opportunities. But over time, systems don’t agree, which can cause tension and conflict in organizations.
Companies must thread the needle, following two rules: First, do all you can to encourage innovation and the growth of specialized language that comes with it. Second, provide the skinniest possible common vocabulary to facilitate company-wide communication.
We’ve all experienced some version of this problem: Ask “how many customers do we have?” and the marketing team provides one answer, sales a second, and accounting a third. Each department trusts its own system, but when the task at hand requires that data be shared across silos, the company’s various systems simply do not talk to one and other.
The problem arises because different systems employ different definitions of key terms. Thus, the term “customer” can mean a potential buyer to the marketing department, the person who signed the purchase order to sales, and the legal entity that it bills to accounting. Then people misunderstand the data and make mistakes. These issues grow more important as companies try to pull more and more disparate data together — to develop predictive models using machine learning, for example.
Specialized vocabularies develop in the business world every day to support new or specialized disciplines, departments, problems, and innovative opportunities. The term “customer” means different things to different departments because, at some point, each required the term to mean something specific to them. Language constantly grows and divides, becoming increasingly subtle and nuanced. But over time, systems don’t agree, which can cause tension and conflict in organizations.
To see this, consider two departments of a consumer package goods company. Day-in and day-out, the marketing department is responsible for promotional activities and rates its effectiveness on whether a particular promotion produces the desired results. Similarly, the logistics department is responsible for getting raw materials to factories and delivering finished goods to public warehouses and onto retail outlets. Neither viewed market share as its top priority, but both kept it current in their databases to be ready for the occasional question from senior management.
Which is exactly what happened. An important issue arose and management asked the two departments to determine whether the company had been losing market share. Each arrived at its own answer, and tempers flared as each vigorously defended its system. Eventually a relative newcomer discovered the problem. The respective systems measured market share at different places in the overall supply chain — marketing at the retail outlet and logistics at the public warehouse. Each approach has merits, but the two are fundamentally irresolvable. The two departments finally agreed on an answer for senior management, but the ill will prevented them from working together for months.
In the face of such discrepancies, companies usually seek technological solutions, including data integration, enterprise data architecture, and master data management, since the issue presents itself as a tech problem. But such solutions face long odds, because they do not address the problem at its root.
