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2024-01-04 Module 1 continued

2024-01-04 Module 1 continued

Owned by Kidd, Denise
Jan 04, 2025
3 min read

Importance of the business taxonomy

Info mgmt challenge

Democratization of content management results in increase in information

Business is conducted on unstructured data, which doubles every 3 months

Knowledge workers spend 15-35% of their time searching for info and 40% of users reported they cannot find the information they need to do their jobs on their intranets.

Findability challenge: to take massive amounts of content and slice/dice to find what’s most applicable, which important to the business.

You don’t know what the user wants, so you give them the world of info and provide tools (facets, taxonomy) so they can get the information specific to their needs.

Business cases for taxonomy value

  • findability

  • standardization

  • risk avoidance and mgmt

Findability

Web retail

  • lift and conversation

  • improved customer satisfaction, greater customer loyalty

Internal systems

  • improved findability = less time searching and more time working

  • improved discovery = less time spent re-creating content

Improved findability

  • lack of findability has a significant impact on opportunity cost

Standardization

  • standardized info architecture = improved findability

  • reinforce organization standard and practice

    • common naming supports communication and collaboration

    • Taxonomy design process yields business alignments

Risk avoidance and management

  • reduce accidental release or deletion

  • higher regulatory compliance

  • improved litigation preparedness and reduced costs

The business taxonomy in practice

Example

  • Metadata field- Type

    • Values: athletic, boots, loafers, oxfords and more, sandals

  • Metadata field - Color

    • Values: black, blue, brown, green, grey, ivory

  • Metadata field - Size

    • Values: 4.5, 5, 5.5, 6, 6.5, 7, 8

  • Metadata field - Brand

    • Values: Antonio Maurizi, Bacco Bucci, Ben Sherman, Bruno Magli

Taxonomy for your organization

  • Topic

    • manufacturing, benefits, infrastructure, quality

    • registration, grades, class scheduling, curriculum management, degree audit, academic calendar

  • Document type

    • forms, policies, procedures, reports, news

    • procedure article, policies, FAQ, master article, blog, process diagram, forms, reports, data cleanup

  • Location

    • North America, Europe, Asia, South America

    • not really applicable to us - maybe replace with audience?

  • Department

    • HR, sales/marketing, communications

    • RSS, class scheduling, veterans, degree audit

Multiple taxonomies

  • can combine synergistically

  • categorize in multiple, independent categories

  • allow combos of categories to narrow the choice of items

  • 4 independent categories (metadata fields) of 10 nodes each has the same power as a hierarchy of 10,000 nodes

    • easier to maintain and to reuse existing material

More metadata fields or more values? 2 constraints:

  • you stop losing value and stop getting consistent tags above 3 or 4 metadata fields across the enterprise

  • You don’t want any taxonomy more than 3 levels deep and/or has anything wider than 10 or 15 values at any particular level or area

Beyond these 2 constraints you want to trigger a secondary metadata field that applies only to a specific subset of the content. If you need more categorization do it at a sub-level.

Common metadata fields

Subject oriented - categorized by subject/topic

  • instantive - each chile category is an instance of the parent (more common in intranets; benefits > insurance)

  • partitive - each child category is part of the parent category (sub is part of whole; car engine > carburetor)

Functional - categorized by the process to which it relates

Organizational - by departments/entities

Document type

Define taxonomy project objectives early

  • What sort of taxonomy are you disgning

  • Why are you designing it? what problem are you trying to solve?

  • Who is your audience?

Long-term investment

  • add, remove, edit synonyms associated with core taxonomy

  • create, edit, delete the second/third level terms

  • secondary/tertiary metadata fields

  • high-level values, enterprise metadata fields.

  • active feedback: surveys, interview, town halls

  • passive usage/analytics: clicks, searches (keywords, frequency, patterns), usage (loyalty, search vs. browse)

Understand your audience

  • who are they?

  • who is the lowest common denominator?

  • spectrum of experience

    • tenured - new employee

    • technophile - technophobe

    • younger - older

    • native speaker - foreign language

Understand your publishers

  • acceptable amount of time per doc

  • number of metadata fields

  • taxonomy complexity

    • informational professional - business user

    • dedicated position - part-time/volunteer

    • few publishers - many publishers

    • homogeneous publishers - diverse publishers

Understand your platform

web → portal → content management → doc management → records management

Looser/less complex → tighters/more complex

Focus on your user

  • deal with the natural vocab of the user

  • understand your business practices and use the most appropriate categorization methods

  • consider multiple taxonomies for disparate audiences

  • use familiar vocab and org schemas to ensure logical browsing experience

Taxonomy is never done

  • respond to change

  • invest in dedicated long term resources

  • allow for extensibility to accommodate new info

  • plan for iteration

  • consider auto-categorization/taxonomization technologies, but recognize that human intervention and oversight is required