The Fight for the Terms

In attempting to improve communication in your organization, you will very likely meet the Semantic Problem: people and automated systems often have communication problems caused by the fact that they interpret messages in different ways. One aspect of this problem is that the terms that are used in the messages may have multiple interpretations. In trying to get rid of this so-called ambiguity, people often suggest to standardize the use of terminology. In my view, there are some serious weaknesses to this approach, and I suggest an alternative.

The Fight for the Terms
There are a lot less terms available for naming our concepts than there are concepts that we use. The result of this shortage of terms is that they are used to denote multiple concepts, so they become ambiguous. These terms are called homonyms: terms that can be assigned more than one interpretation (concepts). This ambiguity of terms can be a very nasty cause of communication problems in general. The solution to these problems is to ‘harmonize every existing disharmony’: remove existing differences or bridge them.

Everyone wants to use simple, recognizable, clear terminology for the naming of their concepts. This need for clear, short and easily understandable terms, in combination with the lack of terms, can easily lead to what I call The Fight for the Terms.

However, this fight need not be. It’s only in certain environments that it will occur. These environments are characterized by a strong belief in standardization. Standardizing the use of terms means to say “Well, in our organization, this term X is the name for the concept Y, and for nothing else.” By doing this, you indeed disambiguate the term, at least within the context of your organization, for you are promoting one interpretation for the term, while forbidding or neglecting every other one. But, as a direct consequence, people who happen to depend on any of the other concepts that used to be named by this standardized term are left on their own. They will have to find another term, which will very likely not be that clear and simple, or even create a description instead. This is undesirable. Moreover, it would be an unacceptably naïve and simplistic idea to assume that these other concepts are of no value to the organization, or that there is no legitimacy for their existence, and hence they should not be used. So what to do?

For solving communication problems caused by ambiguity, we need not rely on standardization alone. What we need to do is to harmonize the use of terms. There exist three different methods for harmonization in general (see figure 1). Standardization is only one of them, and it’s not appropriate in all situations. Still, I find that people often suggest this method as the way to go. Table 1 summarizes some pros and cons of standardization and loose coupling.





I believe we need some sort of mind shift here. Instead of being allergic to differences, trying to standardize everything like a person with a dirt obsession would continuously clean things, we should embrace the idea of local freedom to enable local optimization to local concerns, combined with global harmonization to put things together. This is what loose coupling is about. It results in flexibility, and it prevents the people involved to feel threatened and create roadblocks against change.

Standardization as a means to create harmony should not be put aside, however, because in certain cases, it remains a good and practical solution. We must learn to understand which harmonization method to use best in any specific type of situation. But, IMHO, the attitude should be that ‘it’s loose coupling, unless…’

Standardization of terms should be regarded as a challenge for a long term trajectory (anyone noticed an ambiguity here?) aside from the regular work that is best supported by the loose coupling mechanism. A canonical data model (CDM) is a means well suited to support such a trajectory, because it can take your standards as you create them, bit-by-bit, without effecting the communication partners internally. In addition to that, it can start to fulfill a number of other appliances like a data dictionary to support data reuse or a thermometer to provide you with an insight in the quality of your business language.

So, let’s not fight but co-operate, leaving each other the freedom needed for good performance.