Term Definition Ownership
Assigning one accountable owner per business term, so that a disagreement about meaning has a route to resolution rather than a standing argument.
Two reports show different active customer counts. The investigation almost never finds a bug; it finds two defensible definitions — one excludes trial accounts, the other counts anyone with a login in ninety days — and no mechanism for choosing.
A glossary that lists both definitions has documented the problem. What resolves it is an owner: a named person, in the business rather than in IT, accountable for the definition of that term, whose decision stands.
The definitions worth this treatment are few. Customer, active, revenue, churn, order, region — perhaps thirty terms that appear in executive reporting and cause recurring disputes. Attempting to define every term in the estate produces a project that never finishes and a document nobody reads.
The step that converts a glossary from documentation into a control is binding the definition to the implementation: the agreed definition of "active customer" exists once as a metric in the semantic layer, and reports consume that rather than reimplementing it. Without that link, the glossary states what the number should mean while the reports continue to compute whatever they always did.