2025-02-20 Governance part 1

Overview

1. invite 3-4 weeks in advance (sample invitation available upon request)

2. pre room with the largest whiteboard, good markers, etc. - get the good post its, projector

3. Pacing

   1. first 60-90 minutes - business case and audience definition

      1. ad-hoc, shout it out

      2. 15-30 minutes - verb identification

      3. 4-5 hours - noun identification

4. Get topics up, clean out words that aren’t topics

   1. continue exercises

5. mapping, continue iterating, additional nouns

   1. 7 more topics?

   2. doc types (policies, forms, etc)

6. rank and prioritize new topics resulting metadata fields

Two things happen simultaneously

1. noun exercise - we often first identify things that are actually aren’t nouns but still got up on the board - becomes metadata

2. That process focuses and refocuses on mapping our nouns some of which do become the enterprise topics.

Governance strategy and best practices

Starter taxonomy

• metadata fields

• toplevel topical taxonomy with a couple levels

• content analysis, interviews/focus groups

• first implementable version

Taxonomy Governance Challenges

• long term ownership and responsibility

  • stagnation or breaking it

  • Topics should have the same weight at each level (benefits vs. intramural sports)

  • Roles

    • Taxonomy designer - does it work for the taxonomy?

      • Does it follow design best practices?

      • does it support long-term sustainment of the enterprise taxonomy design?

    • System admin - does it work for the system(s)

      • Can design be implemented within the system?

      • Does it cause an unreasonable increase in administrative burden?

    • Functional business owners/users - does it work for the business?

      • Does it make sense to business users?

      • Can they capture, manage, and find information?

      • will it sustain the support of the business?

• responding to feedback and usage from enterprise of users

  • Most taxonomy design efforts touch only a small percentage of the potential body of users. Taxonomies must be designed to change after rollout.

  • Open

    

  • Active feedbackK surveys, intervies, town halls

  • Passive usage analytics - clicks (paths, dead-ends, content opened), searches (key words, frequency, patterns), usage (Loyalty, search v. browse).

  • Open

    

• interdependencies of taxonomies

• sustainable iteration while adapting to changing businesses