Checklist - Establish the IT Glossary

Synopsis

The Enterprise IT Glossary is a simple and effective means to enable communication among a large number of individuals that may be stakeholders across the HS Agency. Some jargon in use may be peculiar to an HS Agency program, system, location, technology, or time-frame. 

The glossary is a means to capture these special terms and establish a common vocabulary as necessary to promote HS Agency-wide IT understanding and decisions. The Technical Architects and Strategy Team will use this glossary as a basis of their reports and products to help assure that the stakeholders that use their design and planning guidance can understand it within their unique context.

IT Glossary

	The glossary need not collect every term, just those that may cause miscommunication or misinterpretation. The Team Facilitators will generally be responsible for observing where communication is or could be problematic and updating the glossaries.
	There may be many contextual variations on a common term; each term need not be unique.
	List the abbreviation, term, or phrase to be defined in the same manner as it appears in common use (e.g., use of capitalization).
	State the meaning of each term as simply as possible. If other terms are critical to understanding the definition, consider adding those to the glossary (e.g., use hyperlinks). Try not to use jargon in the definition. If a term is used within different context with distinct meaning, the definition should help highlight that difference.
	Identify the context in which the term is used if it has special or different meaning in different contexts (e.g., the term ATM can mean Automatic Teller Machine in the banking community, or Asynchronous Transfer Mode for communications).
	Consider the glossary a living document; update it as the need arises. Changes may be informally tracked, for example using change bars between revisions. Formal approvals are not necessary, but team member review should be performed before the glossary is widely distributed.
	Glossary items may be added to survey and other worksheets to remind individuals collecting the data of  what is intended. This tends to provide a better quality of collected data.