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SharePoint taxonomies are new and exciting. For the first time a widely adopted content management tool can manage and leverage taxonomies and provide for some semblance of vocabulary control,

This is a good thing in many respects and, perhaps, a bad thing in others. For the first time, many large enterprises are looking at classification structures and consistent organizing principles like taxonomies and thesaurus structures as strategic assets and enablers for a wide variety of systems and applications. There has always been some attention paid to data standards but these processes can be so esoteric that even experts have been known to stare glassy eyed into space while data architects wax on about their latest project. The problem is that these things are far removed from the business and are abstract by nature.

SharePoint brings taxonomies to the masses, so to speak, by showing how they are used to make content more findable, useful and valuable. Taxonomies impact every aspect of content processes. And now SharePoint 2010 provides powerful new tools for entire enterprises to muck them up on a scale not previously imaginable. There are hundreds of newly minted "taxonomy experts" who are term store mechanics with little understanding of enterprise taxonomy programs. There are librarians recently turned loose only to run amok with enormous taxonomies dumped into the term store. There are numerous groups positioning to control their own vocabularies and not be held to the corporate standard.

2012 will be the year of the out of control SharePoint taxonomy.

This is a continuation of last month's post: What You Need to Know to End Information Chaos.

Business makes extensive use of taxonomy and metadata in a variety of scenarios including accounting, databases and inter/intra-net based applications to provide structure and organize information.  All this is normal and straightforward.  Chaos arises, however, when a business manager or executive asks questions that cut-across systems.  When, for example, they want to be able to integrate engineering data, customer-oriented product information, customer information, and customer service complaints to identify new product-lines and solution opportunities. 

To achieve the goal of visualizing a business problem by mining information repositories in a creative way to address complex issues involving multiple data repositories, taxonomies and metadata must be aligned to establish a comprehensive "single source of truth."  The concept of a single source of truth is the mantra in the drive to put Master Data Management (MDM) into practice.  However, the effort comes with certain practical and serious challenges.  The most significant being the fact that different and well-governed information systems have different semantics and different metadata standards.  Achieving semantic interoperability is a serious challenge, especially as business systems and network service architectures develop to meet organizational needs to adapt to a rapidly changing technology environment.

So what to do?  How do organizations find ways to capture, manage, and derive understanding from a wide range of sources including its internal expertise resources and the stream of information provided by social media channels?

Part 1: Metadata governance, standards, and maturity

Clients I work with struggle with many issues.  Among these, two often rise to the top.

1. How do we show the impact of metadata on our business?
2. Do we need our own metadata standard? Alternatively, should we use industry standards?

This blog covers my approach to answering these questions.

To begin with, I ask them how they define metadata.  And most often, they give me the usual tautology: metadata is data about data.   You can do better than that!   A more meaningful alternative is to say that metadata is what allows data to be searched, understood, and consistently used within a company.

Metadata provides data with a context that enables users to think about and share data in useful ways.  In short, metadata transforms data into information.  It enables a complex organization to make informed decisions and take appropriate actions because we can look at our collective experience through a common framework of understanding.

The intellectual endeavor of managing "metadata" is at the core of all information and knowledge related work.  Taxonomy is dedicated to the practice of producing logical categorization models, and therefore at the very heart of creating metadata systems.  Human-understandable taxonomies provide the words and relationships needed to access and use information.

Healthcare information technology is undergoing enormous changes with broad consumer impact. One major area of innovation is mobile healthcare or mHealth. mHealth has the potential to provide patients and physician’s with a broad range of interactive tools - the success of which depends on greater effectiveness in standardizing and structuring vocabularies across healthcare. Hence, why this is of great interest to me and our community of practitioners.

MHealth is resulting in new technologies and approaches for healthcare. Classes of application include patient monitoring, remote diagnostics, Rx compliance-monitoring, self-monitoring for wellness, patient tracking, home healthcare, and payment and reimbursement management systems, among others.

The challenges of data management and integration are magnified significantly by mHealth programs and initiatives. This nascent and developing field requires greater numbers of systems and tools to communicate and manage information - as it is, the healthcare IT industry is already a tower of babel of conflicting and confusing standards from MeSH, SNOMED, ICD-9, ICD-10, LOINC and others. This means that further fragmentation from new applications and new entrants into the field will cause problems and challenges to be even more magnified before things settle down into accepted methods for organizing and transmitting data.

Transaction Processing versus Quality of Patient Care

[This post originally appeared on DigitalLandfill.com on August 25, 2011.  It has also been included in AIIM's Governance in SharePoint Toolkit which is available free to Professional Members or $99 to others.  Use coupon code PROMEMX2 to extend your membership through December 2012 when you upgrade to Professional for $139.]

Many organizations are finding that leveraging the full suite of capabilities SharePoint offers requires introduction of a new requirement – that of dealing with, managing and exploiting taxonomies.  Of course taxonomies are not new, but there is some confusion about where managed metadata services and the term store end and true taxonomy management begins.  There are also some misconceptions about the process of deriving and applying taxonomies in SharePoint.  The following are five areas of confusion that we have seen in our engagements and research. 

I was really looking forward to attending the Microsoft SharePoint Conference 2011 in Anaheim, CA and the event didn’t disappoint.  Not only did I get to enjoy that southern California weather but I got the chance to get reacquainted with some old friends, meet some new people in the community and immerse myself in my favorite topic: enterprise search.

The number and range of session talks was staggering.  A few titles hit me right off of the bat as sessions I wanted to see:

• Creating Beautiful and Engaging Web Sites with SharePoint 2010
• Best Practices from the Field: Managing Corporate Metadata and Taxonomies with SharePoint 2010
• The Convergence of ECM and Knowledge Management: Strategies for Success

There were lots more, as well, so my days were pretty jam packed.  My most significant take-away from the conference was a general feeling of well-being as a result of learning that our approach to designing information architectures, taxonomies, and metadata schemas for SharePoint was exactly what Microsoft was advocating as best practice. 

It was also very interesting (and validating) that the song that we’ve been singing here at Earley & Associates for the last several years – that of Search as an Application – has become mainstream.  There were numerous sessions just on this topic, like:

How can you tell the difference between an introverted records manager and an extroverted records manager?  The extrovert stares at your shoes when they talk to you.

That’s actually an old accounting joke and the subtext here is that records managers are boring because records management is boring.  The last thing that people doing cool knowledge management, dynamic content, or search projects want to consider is records processes.  Boring!

The topic brings to mind the old days of file rooms and file clerks.  But these are not the old days and there are reasons now for all information management professionals to care about RM.    Records are created by everyone, everywhere, on all kinds of devices.  A record can be anything that is used in the course of executing a transaction, performing day to day work tasks or that is created in support of a transaction.  That means that we are all creating records.  Records processes are distributed and ad hoc and in most organizations not well managed due to the fact that evolution of technology has happened more quickly than processes can keep up with. 

Here are five reasons why you need to adopt a records management perspective:

As someone whose primary business assets are often intangible or abstract, like models and processes, it’s rather obvious that visualization techniques are important. Without maps, charts, lists, and illustrations, it can be very difficult to capture critical ideas, let alone communicate them with others. And I’ve seen many great examples of visualization in the last few weeks, thanks to the many like-minded individuals who tweet and retweet links to these examples. Some recent infographic favorites include:

Twiterize Yourself

Patent Evil

Is it Really Green?

As helpful as visualizations can be, however, they’re not always the most impactful. Even with training and experience, it is really hard to browse a taxonomy tree, read a map, interpret blueprints, and understand a complex graph or a series of graphs. Informational visualizations still require a level of interpretation that makes an immediate, intuitive, and even emotional response impossible. Compare how much more change is effected by experiencing a physical car crash than by a poster on safe automobile handling; by bumping your head than by noticing the yellow warning stripe; by suffering a baby’s cry than by … well, just about anything. In fact, the screaming wail of an infant human is hardwired into our brains as a call for action.

This was my first time at the Henry Stewart DAM conference, and it was an unexpected pleasure: Unexpected because I wasn’t originally slated to speak at the event at all, but was in fact pinch-hitting for Seth Earley. The pleasure was genuine, however. I found that the entire event had a cohesiveness that I rarely see at conferences of any size. With a single track of shorter-than-usual presentations and plenty of time for conversation, it seemed that all participants attended just about every event. Attendees were also generous with information, from confessions of pain points in their current business processes, to their known and possible solutions. I highly recommend this event.

Thematically, just about everyone was talking the challenges of using assets in multiple contexts and workflows. The keynote about integrating DAM with other technologies; the United Airlines rebranding case study that detailed perhaps the most significant enterprise-level challenges I’ve ever heard in my career; and conversations and demonstrations about ebooks, tablets, and social media all reflected the very real-world wrestling matches that we are experiencing today as media opportunities expand and our tools converge more closely around workflow. It was also clear that DAM needs are growing even more prominent than before, and no more so than during the Accidental Asset Manager panel.

What is possible with DAM today wasn’t even possible three years ago, or at least not without a lot of manual and hard-coded work. I expect DAM tools will continue evolve. Not only do I believe the integration with new tools and interfaces will grow stronger and more transparent, but DAM tools and best practices will exert their influence into other parts of the business. The industry has strong upward momentum, and I expect DAM work to become an even larger part of the conversation than it is now.

I recently taught the four day Information Organization and Access course.  I enjoy teaching and it’s a great way for me to stay connected with customer projects and stay fresh. 

Interestingly at the end of the second day, one of the attendees complained that the course was too theoretical and not sufficiently practical.  I was incredulous at this statement and was so shocked I did not know what to say in response.  Not practical?  This is what we do for our clients. How could it not be practical?

But rather than get defensive or write this individual off as an anomaly (I had not ever heard anyone say this before), I decided to find out what would make class more practical.  I asked each person to write down what they expected to learn that they had not.  What was going to make this practical?

The results were interesting indeed.  I had covered every topic they mentioned, many with examples.  So what was missing?  They wanted the class tailored to their problems.  It would also be nice to have one of the client taxonomy frameworks  I showed as an example to build on.  Basically it would be great if they could come in and solve their taxonomy, metadata and IA problems in the four days. 

It would be great if we could do that but as we reflected on these ideas it became clear that it really was not practical to do this in a public class.  As we discussed the details, we could see that we did in fact cover most of the components that they were mentioning.  The reason for the first comment about theory was simply this:  I had overloaded them with information with no clear plan of attack.  They did not see how to organize the content into a practical set of steps to apply to their own situation.