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Dictionary best practices

Read up on some best practices and strategies around building out a Dictionary within Secoda
We've put together some ideas around best practices when building out a Dictionary within Secoda. There's not one way to go about these as every organization has different requirements, but here are some ideas that have proven to work well
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Choosing metrics

If you have an existing list of metrics and definitions hosted elsewhere...
  • Use our Import feature to automatically bulk upload these into Secoda via CSV format
If you don't have a list yet, and need to start fresh...
  • It's important to initially focus on high-impact metrics that are important to your users within Secoda
  • Consider hosting a small group workshop with your workspace Admins, or some core editors
    • Brainstorm a list of highly-used, high-impact metrics across your organization or data team
    • Think of metrics that are often misused, undefined, or confusing for your stakeholders
    • Vote on the priority of each metric and make plans to gather the right people in a room to develop definitions for these

Templates

  • Utilizing the Templates feature within the UI is a great way to ensure that documentation standards are set and followed
  • Admins of each Team should create dictionary templates so that editors know what kind of information is expected to be added to each metric

Organization

  • Since each Team has it's own section for a dictionary, you might consider ways to organize the many metrics that your organization needs to define
  • Consider using the General Team dictionary as an onboarding tool
    • Define more general metrics that span across the whole organization
    • Define company jargon and acronyms that can often get confusing for new hires
  • Team-specific dictionaries
    • Define terms by Team, based on which team owns those metrics and therefore owns the documentation of them
  • ConsiderNesting Terms so that they are easier to navigate for your users

Enrich dictionary metrics

  • Add enrichment to dictionary metrics by adding them to relevant Collections, adding owners and tags, and link them to related terms
    • Don't forget that you can make bulk changes to metrics and use some of our other documentation tips listed here Documentation best practices
  • This ensures that they're even more searchable within the UI, and so users can see how metrics and resources are related across the workspace

Verification

  • Consider using our Verification tag in order to indicate that a metric is ready to be used, and the definition has been approved by the data team or a list of relevant stakeholders
  • The goal of this tag is to provide trust in the data for users, so that users feel confident using the metric in their workflows