Pre-conference workshop

Getting started with business taxonomy design

Joseph Busch, Zach Wahl

Business users are more active than ever in the publication and consumption of information. However, many organizations are struggling to engage business users in managing the information they create and consume so that it can easily be found and reused. Information retrieval methods like metadata and controlled vocabularies, historically used only by librarians, now need to be made accessible for use by typical business people. As the content management process is “democratized” to business users, taxonomy and metadata must adjust to suit those users.

Unfortunately, many organizations have failed to make this adjustment. As a result, many taxonomies are overly complex and far from intuitive for the end users. This problem is exacerbated by confusion about the definitions, uses, and applications for taxonomies and metadata.

This workshop will provide an introduction to taxonomy and metadata benefits, design concepts and implementation strategies. It will also provide detail on a practical design methodology that will allow you to begin designing a business taxonomy for your own organization. Topics covered during the workshop will include:

• Distinction between traditional and business taxonomies.
• Justification for a business taxonomy.
• Importance and purpose of a taxonomy within an enterprise portal, search engine or other knowledge management tool.
• Planning a taxonomy project.
• Defining use cases.
• Key Components to a Successful Taxonomy Project.
• Running a taxonomy workshop.
• Defining a value statement.
• Defining audiences.
• Defining activities (what you do, what people want to do)
• Defining topics.