denotes premium content | Feb 7 2012 
Enterprise Information archive
Volume 2 Issue 1
Editor's letter
A plethora of developments has seen taxonomies mature, in corporate thinking, from luxury tools to business-critical applications. Analysts and vendors tell us that content itself has grown not only in size, but in its meaning and definition across the organisation, and information architects have realised the need for business processes to change and adapt in line with this growth. With the explosion in content has come the added pressure for companies to adhere to compliance legislation – the adoption of a scalable taxonomy is considered to be the most effective and appropriate method to keep up with the challenge of information overflow and categorisation.
Developers charged with the task of defining and building taxonomies and information-classification systems, however, must strike a balance between clear and obvious definitions that facilitate easy searching, and loosely defined terms that ensure valuable information is not lost merely because it cannot be conveniently pigeon-holed.
Of course, defining a taxonomy, let alone building one, is a difficult process that is littered with hurdles. Get it right and you can greatly enhance the collaborative and knowledge-sharing effectiveness of your systems; get it wrong, and poorly classified content will remain hidden from view.
While we’re on the subject of poorly classified content, taxonomy expert Jan Wyllie takes issue with the UK’s Integrated Public Service Vocabulary (IPSV) on page 41, which attempts to merge three conflicting vocabularies into a single taxonomy covering the whole world of national and local government interest and action.
Readers of Wyllie’s four-part workshop (Zen and the art of taxonomy maintenance), meanwhile, can catch up with his latest advice on taxonomy development on page 36.
I hope you enjoy this month’s issue. As always, if you have any comments, questions or suggestions, please do not hesitate to contact me at
Jason Schofield
Editor
Features
Workshop: Zen and the art of taxonomy maintenance
Last month, we addressed some of the philosophical questions about what taxonomies are and how they fit into information architectures. It was argued that, because taxonomies are primarily social constructions that people use as intellectual tools in the interpretation of meaning, questions need to be considered about what the many different types of automated software solutions were actually doing to people’s thinking processes.
Workshop: Understanding real user needs
In the first part of this article I talked about the need to align knowledge-management (KM) programmes with the strategic needs of the organisation and the needs of users.
I also described some of the methods for using one-to-one interviews to unlock a user’s own understanding about what services, facilities and knowledge would add most value. This second part will explore some tried and tested methods for working with groups.
Workshop: Content migration
In most cases, a CMS is used to upgrade the publishing environment of a mature website or intranet. Therefore, a CMS is rarely implemented without there being legacy content to migrate into the system. This will be the most difficult element of most CMS implementations and may well derail the entire project plan. The paradox is that if the existing system is well organised and managed then there is probably no good reason for implementing a CMS in the first place.
Workshop: The human side of intranets
Does an organisation’s culture change to adapt to a new system or does that culture alter the shape of the system itself? The answer to this question can be found in the natural world – by looking at how large rocks alter the direction of water as it rushes downstream. While these rocks influence the movement and path of the current, they don’t go unchanged themselves. As water moves over and around these immovable rocks, their jagged surface is slowly reshaped into a smooth, marble-like finish.
Case study: Berwin Leighton Paisner
The concept of demonstrating value in knowledge has been a recurring theme for knowledge managers for a number of years. As knowledge management has increasingly become a business imperative for many law firms, the need to demonstrate a return on the significant investment firms are making has become more relevant. However, the reality of how to achieve this has not been easy to grapple with.
Profile: Dave DeWalt
In the eighteen months since storage-systems giant EMC acquired enterprise-content-management company Documentum, life has changed considerably for Documentum’s former chief executive Dave DeWalt.
The crippling costs of IT project rework
In the engineering, manufacturing and construction industries, rework – the process of making changes to original project plans – is something to be avoided at all costs. Few companies embark on building an aeroplane or a skyscraper without mapping out the requirements of the project in meticulous detail and sticking to them as far as possible, in order to deliver the project on time and within budget.
Regulars
The last word: The Integrated Public Service Vocabulary
There’s that old Irish joke about asking directions with the punch line: “You wouldn’t want to be starting from here.”
It is a perfect description of the events that led to the launch of the Integrated Public Service Vocabulary (IPSV) in the UK in April 2005. The IPSV is a product of what one participant called an “impossible” task: the merging of three conflicting vocabularies into a single taxonomy covering the whole world of national and local government interest and action, as well as ‘community information’.
Trend tracker: Mobile working
Recently, the number of subscribers to Research in Motion’s Blackberry wireless platform surpassed the three million mark, with one million of those signing up in the last six months. With Blackberry devices aimed squarely at the professional – as opposed to the consumer – it is a sure sign that the mobile workforce is becoming a reality.
Opinion: Are you ready to blog it?
Most people know blogs are a way to comment on certain topics in a collaborative, web-based environment. Similar to bulletin boards but more like running commentary, blogs provide a forum for opinions and allow users to view the discussion in a hierarchy of some kind for reference later. They were used strategically in the US presidential campaign last year to try to obtain the opinions of voters on certain issues. They are also used on a whole host of consumer-oriented sites to encourage traffic and achieve that all important ‘ear to the ground’ of consumer opinion.
Opinion: Understanding Mr Jellicoe
I’ve often wondered what Mr Jellicoe would have made of the networked world. His real name is not Mr Jellicoe, but in order to avoid litigation I have changed his name from Jeffrey Bramble. Anyway, Mr Jellicoe was a denizen of the public library in which I worked many years ago: he was one of that small group of people who provide librarians with decent drinking stories, and to whom we are always grateful because otherwise we would actually be as dull as everyone supposes.
