Building a business glossary

The glossary is a place to define and store all of the important terms used in the artifacts in your Blueworks Live account. Defining a set of preferred terms and associated descriptions can help achieve consistency and encourage best practises in documenting your business processes, policies and decisions.

To work with your glossary, go to the Glossary tab of the Library page.

Glossary items are grouped into several default categories, including the people referenced in your business documents, such as Participants, Business Owners and Experts, as well as business values such as Problems, Goals and Key Performance Indicators. There might also be additional categories that correspond to process properties added by the account administrator.

This image shows the Values tab of the Glossary page.

An item is added to the account glossary when someone enters a new, previously unused value for a document property, such as specifying a new role in the Participant field of a process blueprint. Users can also add items directly into the glossary by expanding the section and clicking New for the appropriate item type. For example, to add a new input or output, expand the Inputs | Outputs section and click New Input / Output.

Glossary items consist of a name, a description, a visibility status, and optional references. You can filter the glossary items by the text in the name and descriptions or by the visibility status. There are three visibility statuses as described in the following table.

Table 1. Visibility settings
Visibility setting	Icon	Description
Only visible when used		Items set to `Only visible when used` show up in the glossary only when they are used in a decision or process blueprint. These items are not listed in the options presented as type-ahead suggestions in field drop-down menus. If you start typing a value, all matches are shown, including those that are `Only visible when used`. If you create a new glossary item from within an editor, for example by typing a new value into the Inputs field of the Details view for an activity, that item is set to `Only visible when used` by default.
Always visible		Items set to `Always visible` show up in the glossary and are listed in the options presented as type-ahead suggestions in field drop-down menus. By default, when you create a new Input/Output item in the Glossary editor, your new item is set to `Always visible`.
Always visible and preferred		Items set to `Always visible and preferred` show up in the glossary and are listed as suggestions in field drop-down menus before the user has typed any characters. If the admin has enabled warnings for users that enter non-preferred values, to encourage them to use preferred terms, a glossary manager can open each category and decide whether to check the Warn users that enter non-preferred values check box. If the box is checked, a user who enters a non-preferred value in that category sees a warning and must close it before proceeding.

Click the References column to add a file attachment, a hyperlink, or a link to another glossary value.

Adding custom and complex types

To capture richer descriptions of business information, you can add type information for Inputs and Outputs in the glossary. Available types are:

Text
Decimal
Yes/No
Integer
Date
Complex
Custom

To define a custom type, select any existing term from the glossary. For example, if you are creating a new Employee Address, you could set the type to Address, a term that is already in use, to capture the information that Employee Address is a type of Address.

If you define a custom type as Enumerated, the glossary values in this category are restricted to a specific set of values. Only glossary managers can add new values to the set. You can also restrict the Systems property in the same way.

To create a complex type, a term that contains other terms, click the Contents field and select the terms that you want this glossary term to contain. For example, an Employee might contain Employee Number, Employee Name, and Employee Address.

Prefer to watch?

Watch this short video about building your business glossary and using glossary items in your processes.

Read a transcript of this video.

For more videos, visit Big Blue Helps External link opens a new window or tab and go to the playlist "How to use IBM Blueworks Live."