Seth Earley invites you to his tutorial in April
For those of you familiar with my work in the area of taxonomies, I'd like to encourage you to attend the workshop that I am doing in San Francisco even if you have attended some of my prior workshops and taxonomy community of practice conference calls. The reason is things are evolving in some very interesting ways and I am seeing new trends in how organizations are approaching taxonomies and how senior executives are considering taxonomy issues.
I have recently been working with some large organizations on content strategy and taxonomy development and am noticing a big change in the landscape. Rather than going through the downside of the hype curve as I have predicted in the past, my experience has shown that organizations are really learning how to practically leverage taxonomies and more fully integrate them into all kinds of applications. Here is a comparison of some trends that I saw a year or so ago and now. 1 year ago:
- Many people perceived taxonomy to be strictly a web/user interface/navigational construct
- Few resources were devoted to the efforts
- The efforts were part of existing workstreams of defined duration projects
- Line of business people could not see the value or applicability
- Organizations had no idea of how to mobilize business leadership to give this work the attention it required
Today:
- Taxonomy is considered part of enterprise architecture and data standards as well as web applications
- Projects are being more fully resourced as large scale enterprise initiatives
- In addition to having a specific project context, taxonomy and classification projects are seen as being cross project, foundational, and deserving of significant internal allocations of resources
- Business people are requesting that their voices be heard and that their areas represented in taxonomy projects
- Leadership (C Level executives) are paying attention to and understanding what is required to ensure long term viability of taxonomy and metadata projects
What do I base this on? Well, just over a year ago, projects with price tags in the low 5 figures (say in the 50k range) prompted reactions of surprise and sticker shock. Now, it is not uncommon to see $200 - $500k or more being allocated for these kinds of projects (excluding technology costs). There are still smaller scale projects, but when developing any initiative that has a global scale, the price tag is not insignificant. Business leaders are recognizing this and recognizing the need for consistent taxonomies to support even larger ECM projects.
More parts of the organization are being mobilized. Whereas in the past, people would not make time for meetings or would blow them off, we frequently see meetings where more people show up than expected and where interview calendars quickly fill up. Rather than saying "why do you want me there?", it is "when can I meet with you?"
There is also more communication and collaboration between the data side and the content side of the house. This may be due to the fact that each side better understands the perspective of the other, but also because there is more of a blurring of the lines between structured and unstructured applications. A claims process for an insurance company is based on a transaction, but supporting unstructured documentation needs to be associated with that transaction. E-commerce engines are increasingly requiring structured facets in order to make the experience more effective and enjoyable.
People's non working online experience is changing their perspective and understanding of the value of taxonomy in search and navigation. When I was explaining faceted search at a recent workshop, one attendee finally lit up and said "It's like shopping!".... Yes, it's like shopping! <smile> The new ways of navigating commerce sites have led to a greater appreciation of classification and filtering and the role of consistent terminology.
I also had a series of meetings with business leaders at a large financial services organization. These were executives who were just below the CEO of a multi billion dollar firm. Many of them asked about taxonomy governance processes and how we'd integrate with existing standards in the organization. After one of the meetings, the CIO said "we need to get ____ and ____ and ____ together" (rattling off the names of his senior level peers) "and we need to do a workshop on governance"...
Do my ears deceive me? A group of C level executives wanting to get together and discuss taxonomy governance?
Be still my beating heart!
Times have certainly changed.
(Do you want to learn ways to get the attention of senior management and prove the value of taxonomy projects? - I will tell all in our session in San Francisco. See you there... :-))
Seth Earley
