Getting taxonomy right at an organization (part 2)

In the last post, I talked about three challenges organizations face when building a taxonomy and how a current client is addressing the first. In this post, I’ll turn to how they’re addressing the remaining two.

Challenge #2: Taxonomies Can Be Very Manual

Without the use of metadata or taxonomy management tools, an organization has no other option but to manually apply the categories of the taxonomy to information in its repositories—and when the taxonomy, the repository, or the content changes, all this work will need to be redone manually as well (if someone even remembers to do it in the first place and understands all the implications the change has for the taxonomy).

As you might expect, this organization is in good shape on this front as well. The tools they have in place not only enable the taxonomy to be dynamic, but to be maintained with a high degree of automation. I don’t say “automatically”, because changes to the taxonomy still need to be made in these systems with human intervention. But the work required is significantly reduced, because once the change is made in a given tool, the tool syndicates it out to the repositories and the content in them.

Challenge #3: Taxonomies Can Be Abstract Exercises

This challenge is the most important, because if an organization doesn’t overcome it, the taxonomy effort will ultimately be a failure, no matter how dynamic or automated it is. And forget taxonomy, any project needs to deliver results that are tangible, actionable, and specific to have a chance of being successful.

For most organizations, it takes a lot of work to make taxonomies tangible. Part of the problem is that taxonomy is a bit of a buzzword—organizations think they need it without knowing why. So they build taxonomies without an end in sight or a clear vision of what they will use the taxonomy for…or how they’ll measure its success.

And even when an organization has a clear reason for undertaking a taxonomy project, often the relationship of the output to the core, day-to-day work of the organization isn’t clear. What results is a deliverable that seems irrelevant to “what we do at this company”. Not a good result.

This organization is approaching taxonomy quite differently. They know why they’re building a taxonomy: to improve findability, to enable records management, to improve time to market, and to enhance the customer experience. The result is a greater ROI for taxonomy and a larger impact to the organization as a whole.

The Final Word

In the end, the jury’s still out on whether this organization will manage to overcome these challenges in the long run. But given what I’ve seen so far, they’re well  placed to do so.

As always, would love to hear what folks think about this, any experiences they might have had in similar situations, familiarity with taxonomy management tools, and so on.