ABC of Taxonomy

Taxonomy is everywhere in our lives. Imagine how ugly a restaurant menu would be if it wasn’t classified and organized. You might spend more than 15 minutes just to decide what you’re having. Oh, and if you were a group of people with different trends and ages, it might take you half an hour to just to order your dishes.

On the other hand, a classified and organized menu will help you to order your dish quickly and happily, even with a large group of people. It is a mutual benefit for you and the restaurant, since you will get your dish faster, which means your table will be available for the next customer faster as well. Thank you “Taxonomy”.

In business, taxonomy provides a method to organize valuable documents into a structure that is easier to find and use. Wherever the documents are stored, the structure creates logical correspondences between any related collections of documents.

What is Taxonomy?

As in dictionary.com: Taxonomy 1. The science or technique of classification 2. A classification into ordered categories. It seems clear, but I prefer the knowledge management standpoint about the taxonomy. Taxonomy is classification scheme, semantic and knowledge map. Source: Organising Knowledge (Patrick Lambe, 2007)

• A classification Scheme: A means by which employees classify the important letters, memos or e-mail inboxes.
• A semantic: It is meaningful and transparent for knowledge workers within the organization. When a document is labeled 'Project Kickoff', everybody should know what kind of documents they can expect to find within that category.
• A knowledge map: Comprehensive, predictable and easy to navigate, in the course of the knowledge domain of the user covered by the taxonomy.

Nowadays, business relies more on taxonomy to store and retrieve critical information. Different businesses with different consumers and different needs form the way they apply taxonomy of Internet and Intranet. There are types of taxonomy presentation for different business cases and strategy alignment factors. Most common types are:

• Faceted taxonomy: It classifies objects using multiple taxonomies that express their different attributes or facets rather than classifying using a single taxonomy. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faceted_classification

• Example: select a mobile phone based on characteristics such as region, type and price.

• Flat or List taxonomy: group content into a controlled set of categories. Alternatively, simple collection of related things.

• Example: a pull-down menu of country names or geographical regions.

• Trees taxonomy: represents a transition from general to more specific relationships or whole to part.

• Example: phone directories

• Hierarchical taxonomy: a specific tree structure that has inclusiveness, consistency, and maintains the same type of relationship at each level. The child inherits all of the characteristics of the parent and each child can only belong in one place in the taxonomy. Source: Organising Knowledge (Patrick Lambe, 2007)

• Example: Biological classification

• Network or Poly-hierarchal taxonomy: used when an item belongs to more than one place in the real world and multiple organizing principles are required. Provides “virtual linking” between hierarchies.

• Example: a single collection of content concerning diseases can be organized via affected body part and causes.

Stop! Do not mix between taxonomies and navigational taxonomy. Navigational taxonomy helps knowledge worker to organize their documents according to two main folder structures: Organizational or Functional folder structures. It is the way a document is physically organized in a repository providing just a single point of access to the document. If a document is well- attached and indexed using taxonomy, it should not matter how the document is physically listed in the repository. This type of navigational systems adds extra burdens for security and implementation.

• Organizational folder structure: representing business units (Departments, sections, units… etc.)
• Functional folder structure: representing business function (Employee files, employee payroll… etc.)

I am planning to write about taxonomy types in my next post. We will go deeply into the meaning and provide real business case examples.

So, why is Taxonomy important?

Taxonomy is a very critical aspect for today’s business. One of the most significant benefits of taxonomy is to reduce time and costs spent on discovery. Accordingly, document search and retrieval are accelerated to provide the knowledge workers with quick, consist and trustworthy information.

Departments in most organization build its own taxonomy in order to classify the documents they rely on for business processes. They always use their own vocabularies and terms that make sense to the users within the department. But, it doesn’t cross the boundaries of the single department or unit. When document moved around between departments or even among same department units, the classification will be lost.

Therefore, applying uniform taxonomy is a must to have, not nice-to-have, for these organizations in which focus is on information finding and making. It is not the only reason, but there are numerous reasons that should motivate corporations to apply taxonomy across:

• To enable users to share information on an enterprise basis.
• To provide a consistent user experience.
• To make searches more efficient.
• To enable automated capture of metadata attributes needed to classify a document.
• To organize content and aid in navigation.
• To support compliance.
• To retrieve information and clarify results.
• To facilitate collaboration
• To organize projects, processes, and other abstract items by type, topic, and other metadata.

It is time to apply Taxonomy

Before implementing taxonomy, you must plan for it. During my web search on how to getting things done, I found a very interesting 5 phases planning model called the Natural Planning Model. Source: http://facilethings.com/blog/en/basics-natural-planning

Natural Planning Model will help you acquainting your job, but you still need to consider that people is the core factor who makes the project succeed or fail. One of the most successful elements of taxonomy projects is the richness of making data about data. But, if you haven’t considered engaging expert matter people and supporting them through some kind of automation, it will not work.

Change management is a challenge and automatic taxonomy build and insertion is required. Although there are technically advanced products that can build taxonomies with little or no human involvement, completely automated solutions are not recommended for most organizations. So focus on people.

Your first step in planning is to study your company’s business strategy. And then, to find the unstructured documents relevant to the strategy and plan how the massive information could be organized and delivered in efficient way to people when they need it to accomplish their job.

Answering the below questions may help you figure out how your plan should be:

• What is the size of your organization?
• How complex are your business processes?
• What are the common goals of knowledge workers who participate in building your organization’s information?
• What types of documents or content they are creating? And where and how is it stored and retrieved?
• What are the common vocabulary terms used within your business?
• Can your people empathize to the benefits of organizing and classifying information and documents?
• Are they are likely obligated to enforce its classification?

Taxonomy project is a marathon like; simple but not easy. It will be impacted by the complexity of the organization process. It needs a good level of management support to influence participants and impose rules for efficient process application. Besides, expert matter workers involvement and availability is essential to make sure of the quality and correctness of the collected information which is critical to building an efficient enterprise taxonomy.  

I am done now, but I am going to write more posts to cover the subject from different corners, so please wait my next posts:

1. Deeper look into taxonomy types
2. Put into operation: Taxonomy implementation strategy.

Ibrahim Maro