Taxonomy in the Dark

 
Anyone can read about taxonomies and really they are not that hard to understand, we’re not talking about technologies just getting the gist of what a taxonomy is, but it is still amazing to me how many organizations are pretty much in the dark about developing and managing one. Now don’t get me wrong, there are many companies on the other end of the spectrum who could teach courses on best practices for taxonomy development (and teach me a thing or two). But for right now I am focusing on the many that don’t know where to begin. Some are still unsure if they even need a taxonomy.

In defense of these companies, taxonomies can be a daunting challenge. Understanding how to classify content requires manual effort and is an iterative process. Typically it is a long and arduous activity that requires significant human resources and planning. The second challenge is information governance. Despite the fact that enterprise standards for content centric applications has proven to deliver a demonstrable ROI by reducing operating costs and allowing the consistent capture and application of policies across the organization, a gaggle of ‘humans’ are required to define these standards. Once standards are defined, accurate classification is necessary to provide ongoing enforcement of content management policies across the organization. For this to happen, content must be understood from a conceptual level to apply both policy and how to process it.

Our Smart Content Framework™ outlines an information governance plan for organizations who are thinking about managing unstructured content. In all of our building blocks, human effort is required. If you are starting from scratch it is a significant effort by human resources and time.

A couple of years ago I read an article that stated taxonomy development, legacy, and maintenance in year one would cost a little over $800K. I don’t know how accurate that number is, but that’s a lot of moolah in any language.

More to come…