The role of the terminology manager in the Microsoft Dynamics AX organization

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For the better part of our last development cycle, my focus has been on managing terminology. In this blog entry, I address two questions that I have received from fellow Microsoft colleagues when I explain my contributions to the Microsoft Dynamics AX product:

  • What does a terminology manager do?
  • What is the cost benefit of terminology management?

What does a terminology manager do?

As the Microsoft Dynamics AX product has become more sophisticated, we discovered that we needed to take a step back from the product and take a hard look at the content that we deliver in the user interface and ask the overall question: Does the content that we deliver in the user interface enable our partners and customers?

Even more specifically:

  • Are the terms and words that appear in the user interface accurate?
  • Are the terms and words that appear in the user interface relevant?
  • Are the terms and words that appear in the user interface meaningful to partners and customers in their specialized domains?
  • How can we ensure that the terms and the words that appear in the user interface are resilient and will remain meaningful release-over-release?

With hundreds of people contributing to the development of the Microsoft Dynamics AX product, there was bound to be a need to align, and in some cases realign, concepts and their terms across the product. But when we took a closer look at the not just the terms but how they were applied in context of phrases on labels and in sentences, we realized that we needed to do more than align and realign concepts and their terms. We needed to establish a practice for ensuring consistency for how we define concepts, how we select terms to represent these concepts, and how we apply these terms in context of the user interface.

Out of this realization grew the role of terminology manager. As the contributor who was selected to manage terminology, I set out to develop a set of principles, practices, and guidelines to enable us to address our terminology needs.

My primary activities have been to:

  • Research, design, develop, test, and deliver a repeatable, end-to-end terminology management process and terminology management tool.
  • Research, design, develop, and deliver terminology management guidelines and ongoing training.
  • Research, design, and deliver an automated publication process for publishing the Microsoft Dynamics AX glossary on TechNet.
  • Drive teams to use precise and accurate domain-specific terminology.
  • Partner with stakeholders to define concepts and to select terms.
  • Address the alignment and realignment of concepts and terms product-wide.
  • Respond to terminology-related questions from internal and external stakeholders, including translations teams.
  • Help resolve logomachies.
  • Evaluate term entry submissions for accuracy in the domain and in the product against conceptual object models; and for precision, concision, consistency, and adherence to established terminology management and writing guidelines.
  • Develop and deliver terminology surveys to partners, customers, translations teams, business software users, students, and general public to test terms and definitions. Evaluate feedback and analyze survey results.

Managing terminology is not an easy activity. However, it is an activity that I find quite rewarding. I am truly fortunate to fulfill such a rewarding role that enables me to partner with smart internal and external stakeholders and that enables me to learn continuously. 

What is the cost benefit of terminology management?

To answer my colleagues’ question about the cost benefit of terminology management, we needed to evaluate whether terminology management is a sound investment for the Microsoft Dynamics AX product, and we needed to establish a means of measuring this investment.

While we could see the positive impact that the terminology management practice introduced to the product, and we learned from some external stakeholders that our work has enabled their work, how could we quantify the impact? We decided to measure the impact of our terminology work against our terminology objective by validating our terminology output.

To ensure that the concepts and terms that we introduce in Microsoft Dynamics AX are accurate and precise with respect to their domains and that they remain resilient release-over-release, I developed and conducted surveys across our partner, customer, and translator communities.

While our terminology management practice is new and we will need to conduct additional surveys, we learned from our first set of survey results that the practice that we follow for defining concepts and selecting terms that represent their concepts yields terms and definitions that are generally understandable and usable by our audiences.

For an overview and details of the terminology surveys and their results, see my earlier blog entry When is good enough good enough?

We also had to consider the cost of simply acknowledging the terminology challenges in the user interface and not addressing them. We determined that the cost of doing nothing was not an option because there were too many internal and external stakeholders who had asked for our help in resolving questions with respect to user interface content, and it was too costly, especially from a translations perspective, to ignore the terminology challenges. In addition, the first set of survey results validated the need for a terminology management practice that yields accurate, precise, and consistent concept definitions and terms.

Next steps

Are there expectations that you have of the terminology manager that I have not addressed in this blog entry? If so, let me know what those are. As we consider refining the role of terminology manager for future releases, we would welcome your thoughts and suggestions.

Another means of offering feedback for our consideration is to review term entries in the Microsoft Dynamics AX glossary. You can click the Feedback link at the bottom of any entry and let me know what you think. I am interested in hearing from you.