If business or IT users insist that their definition is good and everyone knows what they mean when in fact that is not the case, the strategies below may help.

1. Provide examples of unclear vs. clear definitions

Users who are intimately familiar with their business process and supporting systems may not understand the point of specifying exactly what they need. To them "the ID of the customer" is a perfectly acceptable definition of "Customer ID." Or, the IT representative may give a definition that works for them but no one else, such as "the primary key of the customer table". It will help both to see examples of what is needed in order to have a workable definition to support data warehouse population and use of the data.

Here’s a little-recognized fact about data integration: if you run a business or any sizable chunk of one, someone is integrating your data.

In my professional life I have, on occasion, suggested data integration efforts.  Sometimes my suggestions have been accepted and sometimes not.  As an IT professional I understand that different managers have different priorities, and in a given business situation sometimes other things may be more important than, for example, having a single, consistent source for all customer records, or making sure production data matches financial data.

But as a customer?  That’s different.

Problem:

Our team needed to create a data set listing retail stores belonging to different territories for performance tests that involved store selection.  The data set was to be used by virtual users signing-in as different territory owners.  The challenge was that the territory and store numbers in the data set should be as random as possible.  For example, if there are 20 territories and each territory has 10 stores, the data set should contain the 20 territories with their first stores, followed by the same 20 territories with their second stores and so on.  

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