Those who know me know I like to cook. Early in my quest to develop a taxonomy tied to common business terms, people would ask, “what do you do?” In reply, I said that most people like organization in their lives, especially chefs. If you go into a chef’s kitchen, there is an order to it. Spices go in one spot, knives in another and potatoes in another. There was rhyme and reason to their storage system. It was the combination of a passion for cooking and that in every company I worked, finding content in a timely manner was an issue. Those two things fueled my desire to organize content in neat and tidy “cabinets.”
I mentioned in an earlier blog post, back in the early 1980′s, I worked in a data center, very closely with a corporate librarian. Her charter was to bring order to information chaos. Fast forward to today, finding enterprise information is still hard and getting harder. According to IDC unstructured information (e.g. document repositories, portals, intranets) is being added to corporate data repositories at record rates.
One of the challenges that prohibits quality content storage and access is the lack of common metadata standards which is the output of a taxonomy project. I think that the use of taxonomy starts with content creation, not for keyword stacking in content, although appropriate use of keywords is important for SEO, but for the capture of the natural language and specific business terms used in organizational vocabulary and content.
The value of an enterprise taxonomy is it creates a common language, facilitates content and information access, increases productivity and cross functional interoperability, and in the long run, will save money on information storage and archival costs.
Below are the functions, processes and activities where an enterprise taxonomy can impact your organization.
