Content management

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: 

"How many content types should you have?"

This is the question that came up in a conference call last week on SharePoint architecture. This organization had implemented their corporate portal on SharePoint 2007 and was interested in going forward with more portal sites but had some concerns about the approach to information architecture they had undertaken.

I answered what I would answer no matter what technology it was - "Only as many as you really need to implement the appropriate level of metadata, workflow and templates." Which is of course vague, as most good consultant-ese is. I followed up with some stats: when we work on web content management implementations, we typically end up with about 10-15 content types for a site of medium complexity. We always try to keep the structure simple and number of content types few for many good reasons, ranging from ease of content structure management to content publisher user experience.

The folks on the phone were quiet for a minute... You see, the previous consultant they had worked with had a bit of a different (read opposite) approach. The philosophy they described was that SharePoint content types should be created to the maximum degree of granularity (e.g. one content type per library) so as to reduce the need for content publishers to select a content type and tag metadata values. For example, if you had a site for human resources forms, you would have one library and content type for medical forms, one library and content type for dental forms, etc. Each content type would be extremely specific and require little tagging. "If you need 30,000 content types, then so be it" is the idea. (insert eye twitch.)

How often do you get to be immersed in a completely alien work environment?

As a taxonomist, I get to learn about so many different domains through my work, from mouse genetics to greeting card manufacturing. Each company has its interesting quirks and workplaces...Like the toy manufacturer, whose workers had their cubicles adorned with all sorts of inspiration and materials: multi-colored fur, googly-eye collections, pictures of themsleves as superheroes... 

But this week, I got to experience something completely different.

We just started a content strategy project with a semiconductor equipment manufacturer which aims to help their service groups (the folks who fix the machines) get the right information at the right time. This is an interesting project involving issues around technical writing and information architecture (DITA), integration across many different knowledge systems and databases, and getting information to users in a less than hospitable environment - the clean room.

I have been presenting at several conferences in the past couple of weeks (10 sessions in two weeks) and I am still getting the same situation over and over again. I had an attendee in a workshop on a content management maturity model say: "I am not sure where to start. It feels like this is so overwhelming. Can't we buy the tool first? That's what my boss wants me to do." I can understand why this is a first reaction to the complexity of content management. There are so many issues and factors to consider. From business problems to content architecture, existing systems that require migration and integration, user needs and scenarios, meta-data standards, taxonomy development, work-flow processes, governance, change management and so on. The first time you are going through this, it is overwhelming. But choosing a tool before understanding exactly what you need can create at least three major problems: