In my continuing coverage of a variety of content management and knowledge management topics, I thought it time to share some thoughts and experiences on managing an enterprise taxonomy for a corporation. I am planning a few posts on the topic – starting with a vision for the taxonomy that we developed at the start of our efforts that have helped to guide us, then moving to covering the management process, some insight on usage of the taxonomy and also a description of what the taxonomy looks like.
One important note – a lot of the initial leg work for the taxonomy was done by Frank Montoya and Meredith Lavine, so credit to them for getting things moving.
When we started out in developing an enterprise taxonomy, the company had nothing in place as any kind of content taxonomy – there was an implicit navigational taxonomy for web sites and there was ad hoc taxonomy in “keywords” type fields in a number of content management systems throughout the company. We knew that to be successful, we needed to have more formality to the taxonomy.
As we set about trying to define what we wanted in the taxonomy, we also realized we needed to ensure we were on a common ground for what we were trying to accomplish – otherwise, it was easy to imagine the taxonomy pulled all over the place, making it hard to achieve meaningful results in the long run. We needed some type of common vision for the taxonomy.
In working with a core group of stakeholders, we came up with the following statements as our vision for the enterprise taxonomy.
The Enterprise Taxonomy will:
One note on this vision – it uses the term “classification” in a number of locations. Within our nomenclature, you can read “classification” as meaning the same thing as a “facet” in a faceted taxonomy.
Some of these are pretty straightforward statements, but I thought I’d share a few thoughts on some of them.
First – part of the vision is that the taxonomy is managed as its own asset – what does that mean? It means:
The vision also notes that it will use systems of record. Our taxonomy is broken into many classifications (facets), several of which overlap with other business entities in the company – product lines, solution, geographies, etc. Whenever possible, we literally (in a system, database sense) integrate the taxonomy to pull data from systems of record for those classifications that have a system of record. This provides many advantages:
Given that the taxonomy is managed as an asset, we also felt that it was important that content managers must able to monitor changes within the taxonomy. This means:
So there’s a start to taxonomy. Up next, I’ll provide some insight on the details of what the taxonomy looks like.
A few weeks back, I was asked by Stan Garfield via email about how I might go about measuring if “knowledge specialization” is increasing – it was a question originally raised by Arnold Kling and Arnold had the hypothesis that increasing knowledge specialization in organizations was making management of those organizations more difficult.
Seth Earley was included on the email thread as well, and, while I replied (only on email – I didn’t post my reply here, though I could if anyone’s interested), I was sure Seth would have some good insights about how to go about grappling with the question.
Yesterday, Seth posted his reply on his blog, which I think highlight a good point about the initial theory – that even trying to analyze the level of specialization in knowledge is tricky because knowledge is fractal – no matter how detailed a look you take at it, there are always levels of detail below that. To quote Seth:
[Knowledge] “is endlessly complex and classification depends on scale and perspective. It’s not a matter of “there should be more categories… “; there are more. It simply depends on where you look and your perspective.”
In my own reply, I had a vague feeling of unease about the idea of measuring increased knowledge specialization but did not think through what it meant, I tried to come up with ways one might try to discern a hypothetical increase in knowledge specialization. I’m glad to see Seth managed to more concisely crystalize the vague unease I had with the question.
I also really liked Seth’s summarization:
“The bottom line is that economic value is created not by understanding where all the knowledge is and micromanaging activities, but by providing broad constraints on targets, problems to solve, competitive differentiation, values, and resources and then creating the right circumstances that allow teams of people to focus knowledge and expertise on solving problems. Knowledge classifications are part of the tools for communicating value and telling the organization when trial and error has produced something that can be reused and applied to solving other problems.”