Setting New Objectives: Summary of Taxonomy Bootcamp 2009 Openers & Themes

Subtitle: The Future of Taxonomy... Ad Nauseum

This year's Taxonomy Bootcamp conference was much like years prior: full of great information, knowledgeable speakers, and a ton of self-doubt/-defense/-definition. Which is ironic: professional organizers who struggle to classify themselves. There were at least 3 major sessions dealing with the taxonomist's identity and future (in a 2-day conference with a single track, that's a lot), which left me feeling a bit estranged.

The opening session by Patrick Lambe discussed the identity of the "new taxonomist" in the field, using results from a survey of members of the Taxonomy Community of Practice. His findings were unsurprising to me at least: 

• 58% of professionals have taxonomy work as a secondary role, with primary role being IA or knowledge manager
• the majority of us work in metadata
• librarians recommend non-library skills (e.g. information architecture, content management) for taxonomy learning
  
• a lot of us are getting involved in interesting areas such as structured data management, information architecture, usability, etc.

Lambe also spent some time addressing Theresa Regli's (CMS Watch) post on the future of taxonomies/taxonomists, calling it a "caricature of the profession" and trying to use Google adwords to prove that taxonomies are cooler than metadata. A few breaths later, Patrick went on to highlight many of the same points Theresa made in his discussion of the challenges and and frustrations of taxonomists:

• Showing tangible benefits of our work/lack of understanding of our work
• Limitations of the supporting technology
• Becoming more technologically proficient

So, according to the survey, most people and tools don't get taxonomy, and some of us need to bone up on tech from relational databases to RDF(s).

I personally don't agree with all of this. As a consultant, I'm used to having to explain and sell the benefits of our work and I've found that it takes much less to do it these days. You just have to show people examples they understand from the real world and explain how it applies in the enterprise (e.g. it's like Home Depot navigation for your intranet). A lot of organizations are much more sophisticated as well: whereas I used to spend half my sessions at conferences doing taxonomy 101, now I get folks in the audience asking about cross-mapping multiple taxonomies and master data management.

On the technology front, while I agree that many tools have serious limitations in their applications of taxonomy (e.g. SharePoint and most other content management systems), there are also a lot of really great tools out there that make a showcase out of taxonomy (e.g. Endeca, Nstein, etc.) And we need to embrace them: there are many "bun-head" luddites out there, clinging to Excel for dear life and wishing they'd never heard of NLP, OWL or any other of those scary acronyms.

But let me move on to the opening session on the following day was given by Leslie Owens, Forrester analyst, which also discussed the future of taxonomists and made similar points. Thankfully, Leslie didn't spend much time navel-gazing at the profession and jumped right into the meat of how we can make our message and work more compelling. She had the following 3 key messages:

1. Think of information in a 360-degree view

Consider how information works in a multitude of processes: document-centric processes (forms, document-ouput management), people-centric processes (e.g. call centers), and decision-centric processes (business intelligence). Choose key enterprise processes to align with and weave in taxonomy where it can provide more structure and insight. In other words, go where the power is - forget the limited knowledge-worker-centric paradigm we've been stuck in since the late 90s (i.e. taxonomy is about saving Joe the knowledge-worker 2 hours a week in searching for documents.)

2. Elevate the message to IT and execs

Not only should you go where the power is in terms of process alignment, but also with your message. If you can speak to benefits at the right level and use language that is meaningful, there's no reason you can't address the CIO. Some tips:

• talk about metadata and turning unstructured content into actionable insight, not taxonomy
• talk about alignment, integration and metadata services (implementing small vocabularies across multiple tools), not enterprise taxonomy
• talk about a framework for organizing content and processes, not an enterprise taxonomy "platform"

3. Play with the big dogs

Don't be shy of working with huge technology vendors or being part of big, multi-million dollar investments. There's a massive technology convergence going on - the number of vendors and the number of tools required is getting smaller. Also the enterprise architects are the gatekeepers of technology acquisitions, so engage with them on standards.

Some of the top 15 technology areas we taxonomists should be getting involved with include:

• Real-time business intelligence
• Customer community platforms integrated with business applications
• Master data management (MDM)

Essentially, upgrade your technical skills and be the go-to person who can engage with IT and explain taxonomy and metadata best practices. Don't be afraid of structured content.

Amen.

I've been talking about the relationship between structured data, MDM and taxonomy for almost 2 years to whomever would listen, so I'm glad someone's doing it more publically.

So the morals of the story from Taxonomy Bootcamp 2009 are:

1. Embrace the emerging stuff coming out of the semantic web. We are the right people for that job.

2. Technology is cool. Hug an auto-categorizer today, because it’s not about whether machines can do your job, it’s about how you can use machines to take the profession to new levels.

3. Structured data and business intelligence is the next big deal for us – it’s the seat of a lot of the power and value in organizations. So google MDM and take your enterprise architect out to lunch.

Can't wait til Taxonomy Bootcamp 2010, on the East coast for the first time in Washington DC!