Seth Earley's blog

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.

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

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:

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.

Organizations are paying more and more attention to Master Data Management (MDM). MDM comprises a set of processes and tools that consistently defines and manages the non-transactional data entities of an organization .  According to Gartner, two-thirds of Fortune 1000 organizations will have deployed 2 or more MDM solutions by 2014.

MDM promises not just greater control over consistent reference data; but an ability to manage the relations between data entities in order to generate more effective business knowledge. From this perspective,  MDM requires an understanding and agreement about the meaning of terminology.   Hence, the natural role of taxonomy.

"You ain't seen nothin' yet." So says an IDC report on the growth of information.  The statistics cited by IDC included voice, radio, print and TV as they transition to digital formats. The number? 35 trillion gigabytes. That's 35 exabytes. An Exabyte being one thousand billion billion. But, how much, exactly, is 'too much' information? Is there really such a thing?

Consider that back in the 16th century, around the time when the printing press was invented, the world was undergoing an information explosion. People wondered, how could anyone possibly read all of those books? It was quickly determined that we didn't need to read all the books and what was needed was simply an index of all the available books. This evolved into today's library system where all books are accessible--if and when needed.

This so-called "information overload" problem will be solved in the same way - by creating lists, classification structures, bibliographies, reference materials and all sorts of dynamic, curated content. The best web sites have the capability of anticipating what users need and assembling that content dynamically - something we refer to as Content Choreography™ - the ability to coordinate, weave and present content into new information products and services based on the needs of a diverse set of users all operating on the site at the same time. And of course, to combine, curate, and choreograph content effectively requires metadata, taxonomies, consistent organizing principles tuned to audience, task and problem.

This article was published online at Baseline Magazine on May 3, 2011.

IBM’s Jeopardy-playing Watson computer has been hailed as a technology triumph – the ability of computers to understand human language and broad knowledge topics – not just facts and trivia but ambiguous language including puns, double entendre’s and idioms.

The technology is impressive and IBM has set its sights on many commercial applications in healthcare, financial services and customer service operations.   Few organizations have the resources it took to build Watson - $3mm worth of hardware (off the shelf servers with almost 3000 processors and 1 terabyte of RAM) – not to mention millions in research.  Nevertheless, the question remains, does Watson embed a solution approach that enterprises can exploit or learn from?  How readily can a “Watson” be applied to the knowledge and content access problems of the typical enterprise? 

A few clues lie in the nature of knowledge access and in some of the challenges that Watson team members discussed in articles and interviews.   First, here are some principles that Watson exploited:

I just returned from the Sentiment Analysis Symposium, recently held in NYC where I presented a short talk on the role of taxonomy in social media. This conference focuses on solutions that discover business value in opinions and attitudes in social media, news, and enterprise feedback.  I used my Blackberry to tweet ideas in real time during the session (hash tag SAS11).

This combination of immediacy and mobility has interesting implications for business. Consumers are connected to the feedback and opinion of others and are increasingly using their devices to research products and services through multiple mechanisms.

We'll be addressing aspects of this in our session this week on "Optimizing the Information Supply Chain for Competitive Advantage" where we will discuss how optimized supply chains, cross channel shopping and mobile commerce will require integrated taxonomies and metadata.

Healthcare and Electronic Health Records is the topic of a two part call we are presenting in May.  This is another area where the development of systems that can provide immediate and accurate information about patient health will depend on taxonomies. Patient safety data, evidence based medicine and integration of diagnostic and patient management systems along with a range of other methods to improve quality and control costs will require harmonization of complex healthcare and life sciences information sources.

I don't usually rave about specific technologies but Xobni is one of those tools that I can no longer work without.  When I teach courses on information access, I tell my students to build functionality that solves critical problems and that becomes a “must have” tool.  Build the things that users will scream about (or at least complain loudly) if you take them away. 

Xobni fits that requirement.  I had to remove Xobni once due to a problem with Outlook and kept missing its ability to find contact information, the contents of email messages, conversations that I had with prospects and colleagues, and, my favorite, the ability to locate messages when you don’t know the format of a person’s email address.