The CM Pros debate on taxonomies

On the TaxoTips website there is a set of videos recorded at the recent CM Pros Summit in which two taxonomy consultants, Theresa Regli of Molecular and Seth Earley of Earley & Associates, debate a number of taxonomy issues.

I thought the list of questions was well chosen to reflect many of the big up-front issues that organizations wrestle with when embarking on a content mangement project. I also really liked the format and was impressed by the ease with which both presenters were able to argue the alternative sides of each question. As they say in the intro, they can do this so well because these are arguments that they have had with their own clients many times.

Most interesting for me were items 8, 9 & 10 because they relate most closely to the issues concerning Altien's customers. The real conclusion of #8 "Can taxonomy development be managed as a project?" seems to be that when you are starting you need to run it as a project to get focus and involvement within the organization, but don't think you have ever finished. The taxonomy will inevitably need to evolve and only by recognizing this and actively working on it will the ongoing success of the content management system be ensured.

Most of Altien's customers have been doing document management for between five and ten years. Through this time they have really learned what works for their organizations and one thing that stands out is that they all now put serious effort into their taxonomies and the quality of the metadata in their systems. As one customer said to me a while back "you have to think of a DMS as a garden - if you don't look after it, it will get choked with weeds".

As the two presenters say in items 9 &10, there are tools that can play a part in this, but you cannot succeed without human intervention. The problem of course is that people and taxonomies don't always get along. If you make your taxonomy too granular and rigid, then you risk deterring users from adding their content at all. If you make the taxonomy too loose, you risk getting a patch of weeds.

In developing Altien Document Manager we have put a huge amount of effort into making the interaction between the user and the taxonomy as efficient as possible. We have customers in a wide range of industry sectors including Energy, Utilities, Telecoms, Financial Services and Government but one thing they have in common is that they all take the issues of taxonomy and metadata quality seriously.