A common sense vocabulary for people, process and technology

“….the practice of naming and organizing things, is an ancient art”

What is SG&A and how can it help me classify content?

Every publicly traded company in North America reports earnings based on a calculation from Sales, General and Administration (SG&A) costs. SG&A functions include Sales, Marketing, HR, and IT. The only thing that SG&A does not include is product costs e.g. material, direct labor, and manufacturing overhead. An SG&A taxonomy can help a company become more effective and efficient because it organizes and categorizes content for search, findability, navigation and it gets everyone speaking a common language.  Enterprise content has no bounds, it ebbs and flows across business activities, it is people and systems who create silo’s and those create inefficiencies across SG&A.

If your content can’t be found does it exist?

A 2011 Forrester report cites up to 19% of SG&A expense is tied to hidden costs to support sales and according to IDC, the average knowledge worker spends 9.5 hours per week simply looking for information.

A taxonomy framework enables a common language and accurate translation of terms for documents, functions, processes and activities. Taxonomies effectively manage information and content for access, search, findability and collaboration.

The intent of this site is to allow the reader to develop a taxonomy framework for content repositories that bridges the “real time” data gap that exist due to non-integrated systems and processes. Enterprise taxonomy or controlled language is a political hot potato, a taxonomy initiative requires executive support. For sustainable adoption, start with a small pilot project. Go talk to people in any department, you will not have to look long or hard for a person with an information management problem that a taxonomy and some tools can’t fix.

An enterprise taxonomy enables content and information to flow from process to process. As companies look for solutions to increase revenue and reduce SG&A expense, now is the time to identify content and information gaps and plan for the implementation of a component based enterprise content taxonomy.

SG&A Process Taxonomy for SharePoint® Content Stores

Taxonomies are difficult to create, because creating a common language across a large, complex company is hard. People have opinions and legacy vocabularies may get in the way. Many companies need help facilitating a common language, the use of third parties who have experience in developing taxonomies for large global companies will save you money and time in the long run.

If you have questions on integrating your content-centric process and workflow into SharePoint 2010 please contact Seamus Walsh at 802-922-6943.