Are Enterprise Data Dictionaries Viable?

Many a company has tried to establish a data dictionary, but very few have achieved true success.  Why? Dictionaries are for the brave of heart. The first-ever English dictionary took Cawdrey a lifetime to create and had 2,500 words when Shakespeare was already using 25,000.  Johnson’s dictionary crawled to 40,000 words 150 years later.  It took another 100 years to get to 400,000 in the first Oxford English Dictionary.  Hard as their task was, these lexicographers were assembling words in use, not fighting users to reveal their vocabularies.  Their readers were constantly providing real-world feedback as they used words in their writing.  By contrast, the systems and databases that enterprise data managers need to document don’t share their data models easily-if at all.  It’s no surprise that enterprise dictionaries seldom make headway.  Will large language models change this?  Look for our next blog for our take.