Taxonomy

I was very pleased to receive the following notes from a participant in one of my recent SharePoint IA courses.

“This workshop is powerful and more than meets my expectations!  I wasn't sure if I should attend as I'm not a technical person, but am a member of the IT project team.  It is immediately applicable to my job.  I plan to share the information with the project team when I return to the office… I have already gained some excellent tools to work with each of the businesses as we migrate them to SharePoint 2010. “

This was wonderful feedback and it prodded me to try to distill what it was that attendees valued about the course.

This class pulls together a number of principles around information management strategy, process analysis, user research and taxonomy to guide development of key information architecture constructs in SharePoint.   All fine and good, but similar to standard IA approaches and not terribly exciting . Describing the course curriculum doesn’t really communicate  the value that students take away from the class.   So, I spent some time trying to think through the situations in which I have seen light bulbs go on. 

It’s in the structure of interactive exercises.   Students are given seemingly simple problems to solve, yet they yield deep insights.  Take a simple exercise around term derivation. (Used for populating the SharePoint term store.) 

I recently taught the Information Architecture for SharePoint class in Chicago.  Each time I teach this class, I gain more insights into how SharePoint content needs to be organized.  This last time, I had some new thoughts on how to consider a site map. 

I really enjoy teaching our new workshop on SharePoint Information Architecture (IA). There is nothing like teaching to further one’s own knowledge. The classes attract a diverse range of students. Some come knowing little about SharePoint or IA; others have expertise in either SharePoint or IA. The mix of knowledge in the class brings a wide range of issues to discussions and the class-dynamics and interaction lead to valuable new insights into SharePoint design, development and adoption.

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.

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.

The heart of Web 3.0 is semantics.  Semantics focuses on what one means to say, not just what one actually says.  Semantics is the difference between salient search results and an unfocused aggregation of … stuff.  Algorithms used by search engines are an effort to discern the meaning and rank relevance against users short, ambiguous, approximation of intent expressed in their search queries.  Web 3.0 semantics represents a significant advance over current search technologies because it attempts to look at meaning inherent in the content itself. 

To understand how this works and the role taxonomy plays in this search for meaning a little review maybe helpful.  Taxonomy categorizes information into a unified structure and controls the language to describe those categories.  Under this definition, the contributions of taxonomy are labeling, designing content, providing navigation patterns, and managing the relationship among content units.  These roles for taxonomy are essential to successful site development, especially as sites are increasingly dynamic, drawing content directly out of content management systems, and increasingly socialized to the point that systems rooted in databases are no longer able to scale to meet the storage demands.

Taxonomy is an integral part of a content producer's tools kit for adding metadata to their site.  Metadata presents an interpretive model for understanding content data, or the types of data actually evaluated by search engine algorithms.

"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.

In online retailing the only opportunity is the information-based opportunity.  In this post I want to talk about that bold statement. 

Selling online is dependent upon information.  Without information for the customer to process it is essentially impossible to sell online.  It is true that selling online is not all about information.  Brand and product selection, pricing (which is both information and a retailer choice), availability and quality of fulfillment, to name a few parameters, all count for the customer.  But in online retailing information is the customer experience.  It is crucial to understand that not all information for your products and customers is equal in terms of you touching and then leading your customers to the point of sale.

Standards and Uniqueness

In terms of using information effectively, we can see selling online as a play between two competing yet also complementary momentums.  Between leveraging industry information standards – to gain efficiencies in time, resources and costs – and creating and then leveraging information uniqueness.  There are many information standards for retailers to work with – for example those from The Association for Retail Technology Standards (ARTS).  Standards are where you will share information values and models with your peers and competitors and use the same information in the same ways.  There is nothing lost competitively, and much to be gained (and saved) with you and your competitors using exactly the same lists of geographic locations, components and variants of personal names, classifications of the same types of prices (list, regular, suggested) and so on.

I recently pulled out my yellowed copy of Michael Dertouzos’ 1995 What Will Be: How the New World of Information Will Change Our Lives.  What I found interesting is how some of those predictions were spot on and some oddly naïve about just how much humans can change.

In “What Will Be” the term used to describe how people get their jobs done by leveraging various tools for managing documents and information was “Groupwork”.    Today, we simply use content management applications to get our jobs done.    See my recent blog, “This internet thing? It's gonna be BIG!” for more discussion on what will be, what is, and what is to come.

As I looked back over the last 15 years, I thought about the progress made in content management platforms; and the hype that accompanied each one.  “Now, we will we have an end to information chaos! We can control what goes where and enable easy access!”  Sadly, each new offering led to its own flavor of information chaos. 

So is SharePoint 2010 the platform that will solve the problem? Or, will we find that information chaos is migrated along with content?   It’s really up to you and your organization. The opportunity is there but don’t take it for granted.

As I talk to companies and other enterprises, I find that most fall into the same trap – they buy a tool, install it, roll it out and wait for their people to get more efficient and effective.  They wait… and wait… and…  Instead of things getting better, they actually can get worse. 

Why is this, I asked myself.   Here are the five things that came immediately to mind.

This week I have had the privilege of teaching the information organization and access (AIIM IOA) course at a combined meeting of the Joint Task Force North, The Dept of Homeland Security, The US Army North and the US Northern Command.

From the JTF site: “The Joint Task Force North http://www.jtfn.northcom.mil/ is the Department of Defense organization tasked to support our nation’s federal law enforcement agencies in the identification and interdiction of suspected transnational threats within and along the approaches to the continental United States. “

“Transnational threats are those activities conducted by individuals or groups that involve international terrorism, narcotrafficking, alien smuggling, weapons of mass destruction, and includes the delivery systems for such weapons that threaten the national security of the United States."

One of the primary goals of this mission is the capture and dissemination of knowledge throughout a network whose mission is the protection of the United States.  I was told by the head of the knowledge management organization, Dr Rick Morris, that my contribution would go directly to improving the security of the country.  I have to say that I am truly honored to be making such a contribution to our nation. 

Also from the JTF site: “JTF North’s homeland security support role is articulated in its mission statement:

I speak to many CIO’s who think taxonomy is an arcane piece of library science.   Haven’t they heard of eTaxonomy?  Well, of course not.  While we labor to embed taxonomies into technology solutions, vendors take the credit for their “highly configurable solutions.” The good but unrecognized work we do needs a 21^st century name – hence eTaxonomy.

Etaxonomy is the art and science of integrating taxonomy into deployable IT solutions.    Our professional community of taxonomy practitioners is getting sophisticated at this.  The best web sites today achieve usability through dynamic content presentation enabled by taxonomy.  New classes of solutions, such as Marketing Resource Management, get their power from hierarchical information models that integrate diverse information sources.   And critical initiatives in healthcare, such as electronic patient records, leverage taxonomies for coding.

So taxonomy is not your father’s library science construct. It’s not a spreadsheet of terms.  Rather, it’s about methodologies for enabling smart computing through the use of sophisticated semantic models.   That’s what eTaxonomy is.   So taxonomists of yore, start calling yourself eTaxonomists, and make sure your CIO knows about the secret sauce.

In future blogs, I will discuss eTaxonomy in different solution settings.  I look forward to getting feedback on this concept and whether it will help you make your case to management.  Also, check out our  Insight Webinar Series  for a deep dive into eTaxonomy solutions and approaches.

Information professionals interested in taxonomies now have another conference, besides Information Today’s Taxonomy Boot Camp, that has numerous taxonomy sessions. This is the annual conference, usually in June, of the professional association SLA (Special Libraries Association). I attended this year’s conference for the first time, which was held in New Orleans, June 13-16, and was quite impressed with its taxonomy-focused sessions and networking opportunities.

Although there is no professional association dedicated just to taxonomists, the new Taxonomy Division of SLA has begun to change that. SLA is the leading international association of library and information professionals working corporate settings, government, nonprofits, and educational institutions with specialized research and information management needs. Until recently, its Knowledge Management Division came closest to serving the interests of taxonomists, but since August 2009, those engaged in taxonomy work now have their own group within the association. The SLA annual conference in June this year was thus the first that the Taxonomy Division was able to sponsor sessions, and it did in a big way. In the past, SLA included only a pre-conference workshop and perhaps a single session on taxonomies, but this time the two and a half days of regular sessions was filled with taxonomy-related programs in every time-slot and one time with conflicting taxonomy sessions.

Best Practice #3: Use concise and precise terminology.

As I've mentioned in previous best practices (#1 Less is more and #2 Grouping and chunking), a lot of these design principles apply to any navigational construct -- using concise and intuitive labeling seems like a no-brainer. Given the textually charged interface and the amount of thinking you are asking people to do to navigate your site, mega menus simply force you to follow these rules more strictly.

Hunting and pecking for the right label to click on in a mega menu is no small task, so you really need to avoid the 2 major categories of labeling problems:

1. Excessive length & concatenation: 

When you're trying to cram 20+ links in a hover pane, every character counts. If you've got extraneous words in your labels that make your links harder to scan, or even worse cause wrapping (*gasp*), take out the scalpel and try some creative rewording or restructuring. Labels should be short, sweet and precise, leaving nothing to guessing. Call it what it is as simply as possible, don't try to be fancy - you'll just end up confusing users.

Additionally, avoid concatenating (joining) more than 2 items in one label. Laundry list labels (this, this, this & this) are much harder to scan, as you force the user to read all the way to the end before they can move on. We also recommend you avoid having too many concatenated items in one menu or group. Ampersand-farms can make a menu much harder to scan and it usually means that you have tried to put way too much in one category and need to think about restructuring.

Here's an example of some labelling that breaks these rules:

The Faceted Fallacy

... If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear, does it make a sound?

Yes I know it’s a silly old question, with no real definitive answers but it makes our brains think creatively about ambiguous problems, which is fun.  A recent thread in the Taxonomy Community of Practice really got me thinking this way in relation to taxonomy.  

To summarize the thread, the question was raised, what are the most commonly used facets in an enterprise taxonomy? In response one member posted a “definitive” list of primary facets that could be used as an exhaustive skeleton for the “enterprise”.  From here the conversation split in multiple ways:

Best Practice #2: Use chunking and grouping to increase scanability and learnability

So you’ve taken the mega-menu plunge and you now have more labels to fit into your drop-down. How do you make sure it doesn’t look like a mess of text?

There are a couple of options:

Grouping:
Create clear and logical groupings within the menu and give them prominent labels that can easily be scanned.

There are four elements to this approach

1. Logic: Groups have to be internally coherent and logical. Either they are all children of a common parent or somehow conceptually related in a way that is evident and quickly learnable.

2. Labeling: Use simple, unambiguous labels that convey the nature of each group. Decide if your labels will be “clickable” – is there a landing page behind them or is it just a visual way-finder? The mega-menus tend to discourage clicking on such intermediate levels, but marketing may want the space to provide category-level merchandising.

3. Volume: Follow general good practice on number of items in a category. We can thank cognitive science for an easy rule of thumb of 7 +/- 2, but I would say that in a mega-menu, space being limited, I would reduce that to 5 +/-2. This will reduce visual noise and fits well with best practice #1 (less is more).

4. Visual distinction: Use striking colors, increase white space between groups, use shading or dotted lines… anything that you can do to make a visual separation between the groups so that they eye can quickly skip from one group to the other without much thinking.

Let's look at some examples.

The final draft has been submitted... Mark your calendars...

The Information Management Best Practices 2009 book is going to publication this week, in hopes of being ready for launch at the J.Boye Conference in Aarhus, Denmark, Nov 2-4. I'll be there, giving a talk on SharePoint IA, but also to lend a hand with the book launch activities.

I'm proud to have a chapter in this book, with co-authors Seth Earley & Charlie Gray (CMS & Taxonomy Strategist, Motorola), on one of our most in-depth and successful projects - integrating taxonomy with CMS at Motorola. The best practice covers the steps below in great detail, offering practical advice and screenshots from the actual implementation at Motorola.

Looking for a good way to spend a week in the California sun and learn more about taxonomy, search and knowledge management? Look no further than the triple-slam event of the fall conference season:

Taxonomy Bootcamp / KM World / Enterprise Search Summit West
Register today with our discount code to save 200$!

Mark your calendars, cause we have a full slate of taxonomy-related presentations this year, including:

Workshop: Taxonomy Implementation & Integration (Seth Earley & Stephanie Lemieux)
Date: November 16, 2009 - 9:00 - 12:00
Come hear Seth & I talk about how some of the companies we've worked with have been able to implement their taxonomies and integrate them with WCM, ECM and digital asset management systems among others. Hear about practical applications of taxonomy within different classes of tools as well as technical integration challenges (hierarchy challenges, build-vs-buy issues, etc.).

I had the great pleasure of doing a podcast a few weeks ago with Paul Miller, podcaster for Nodalities (magazine & blog), on hybrid approaches to folksonomy and taxonomy and their role in the enterprise.

We discussed the now tired debate of folksonomy vs. taxonomy, and focused on the strengths and applications of each approach. I covered how organizations are leveraging social tagging and what some of the pitfalls are in the enterprise context.

I also talk a lot a few of the hybrid approaches to taxonomy & folksonomy:

• Co-existence
• Tag-influenced taxonomy
• Taxonomy-influenced tagging
• Tag hierarchies

My last few blog posts on keyword research tips have generated interest from our readers regarding the relationship between the SEO task of keyword research and taxonomy. The purpose of today’s post is to examine the intersection between the two and offer a little advice for reconciling the internal perspective of taxonomy with external internet search. We can harmonize these perspectives using a data-driven approach to understand the "mental model" of the external searcher.

On this first day of 2009, I thought I'd take a moment to reflect on the CMS Watch list of predictions for 2009. Getting big play in the top 3 is "Taxonomies are dead. Long live metadata!".

"With social computing coming to the fore, it's never been more obvious that everyone does not, and will never, categorize things in the same way. It doesn't even matter what's correct anymore... I will assert that the days of the traditional, definitive, and single-hierarchy taxonomy are long behind us."

I think that this is accurate -- insofar as it uses the traditional, definitive and single-dimension definition of taxonomy that I agree ought to be left in the dust along with corded telephones and dot matrix printers.  I mean, I can't even remember ever building a taxonomy that was meant to be traditional or had a single-hierarchy.

Taxonomies, as hierarchical vocabulary structures, clearly define relationships between words and concepts. If a taxonomy is implemented and governed properly, there is a high degree of control over how terms are added, modified, and deleted. Terms used for content tagging can also be controlled in how they are selected and applied. Similarly, records management is a discipline requiring high control over documents meeting legal compliance. An ARMA fact sheet defines records management as “the systematic control of records throughout their life cycle.”

Strangely enough, taxonomies and records management remind me of the Panopticon, a prison imagined by the English social theorist, Jeremy Bentham. Let me explain. The Panopticon is a circular architectural structure with an observer in the middle able to keep surveillance over many prisoners at one time without the prisoners knowing who was being watched at any given moment. This allowed for great control at great economy.

As a liberal with world views shaped by films of the 1980s riddled with paranoia about governmental control and espousing an anti-Orwellian future as imagined in 1984, the concept of control of any kind stirs my blood. The Panopticon could very well be the source of Tolkien’s Eye of Sauron, presented in film as aloft in a tower—a kind of all-seeing eye with a 360 degree view. However, and here’s the connection, the control of records in an organization supported by a taxonomy structure can mean the difference between being fined millions of dollars and providing information during a legal discovery process. This by simply managing which information should be retained, retrieved, and/or disposed of properly and in a timely fashion. There is the bridge between the Panopticon and taxonomy and records management; now to build the bridge between taxonomy and records management.

Here is the question posed by Arnold King (http://arnoldkling.com)

"I am interested in the phenomenon of knowledge specialization.For example, in medicine, there are many more specialties and sub-specialties than there were 30 years ago. My guess is that if libraries are still using classification systems, there should be a lot more categories. My guess is that major universities have many more departments than they did 30 years ago. I think this is important in economics because I think that businesses and economic systems have become harder to manage as a result. In short, the leaders tend to know less about the specialized information that is further down in the organization, because the amount of the latter is increasing (I conjecture). I would like some quantitative indicators of the rate at which new knowledge categories or sub-categories are being developed. Do you know how to even go about searching for such indicators?"

I spent some time thinking this over. I may have ranged too far from the question and I know I am preaching to the choir here, but thought the issue of economic value creation and knowledge categorization would benefit from a bigger picture perspective. The problem with the question is that knowledge is fractal in nature. It is endlessly complex and classification depends on scale and perspective. It’s not a matter of “there should be more categories… “; there are more. It simply depends on where you look and your perspective.

Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves." (1)

Recently Chris Anderson wrote an article for Wired magazine called the The End of Theory. The thesis of the article in a nutshell is that the impending petabyte era of data storage signals the end of the traditional scientific method of discovery. No longer are we bound to the outdated model of observation, hypothesis and measurement. Computers (developed by Google & IBM) "can throw the numbers into the biggest computing clusters the world has ever seen and let statistical algorithms find patterns where science cannot."

The Other category: also known as General, Miscellaneous, My Stuff, or, too often, the shared drive.

The Other category is the junk drawer for all those taxonomy terms that just don’t seem to fit anywhere else. Reaching into it is taking a chance as you never know what you may find—the yo-yo you can’t seem to throw away, a pair of rusty scissors threatening to impale you when looking for loose change, batteries, baggy ties, the old cell phone with numbers in it of people you don’t even remember. When it’s time for cleaning up, you can either throw it all away or sort it out and put everything in a more appropriate place.

In my last post, I mentioned the difficulty that some clients/stakeholders have in letting go of certain terminology when they undertake a taxonomy project:

Search engine optimization (SEO) has become one of the most important tools in helping us taxonomists get hard data that is meaningful and fight against the inclusion of terms that are too cute, ambiguous or otherwise detract from the findability of content.

In our work of building and maintaining e-commerce taxonomies, we often run into the problem of products not fitting nicely into one single category. Although this problem is not specific to e-commerce taxonomies, their use for navigation and browsing presents a special categorization challenge; the need to lead a wide range of customer types down an intuitive path to the product they are looking for. Think about something as simple as a pair of headphones: where do they belong in the following hierarchy?

We recently had a prospect ask what they needed to consider as part of their taxonomy RFP. Here are some things to include:

1. Specific approaches to taxonomy development: steps for term extraction, approaches for automated and manual content audit procedures

2. Taxonomy testing: What are the methods by which the taxonomy will be tested prior to deployment? What usability tests would be performed and what data would be collected?

3. Metrics: How will search engine and web tracking metrics be used in deriving the taxonomy?

One of the biggest challenges to maintaining quality and value in a taxonomy lies in keeping interests aligned and resolving conflicting perspectives. By its nature, a taxonomy attempts to reconcile diverse perspectives – those of various types of users, engaging in diverse tasks. It also needs to support the needs of merchandisers who are vying for valuable site real estate. But what is the true purpose of the taxonomy from a strategic perspective? Is it to market the company’s offerings? Educate customers? Sell merchandise? Help the customer find answers?

One of the things that we get called in to help with is the set of governance policies and processes that are necessary to make taxonomy projects a success. There are number of things that need to happen for organizations to be effective in this area:

1. Sponsorship: Someone with power and authority needs to understand the value of taxonomy and nomenclature governance This person can help settle turf disputes and conflicting organizational requirements. The key is that they are truly engaged and really get it, rather than delegating authority.

2. Ownership: An operational champion needs to own the project. This is the person to whom ultimate accountability falls. They are the one that has to drive communication and get people to participate

A number of clients and prospects have come to me with the same dilemma. They have been engaged in varying levels of taxonomy programs and have arrived at a point where they need to overcome a certain sticking point in their projects. They are wrestling with challenges around getting real benefit from their taxonomy projects. While on the surface, taxonomy as a concept is straightforward, getting the organization to embrace standardized terminology and consistent classifications is incredibly complex. It impacts so many aspects of the organization on many different levels: many classes and instances of technology, work processes and practices, change management and governance. Here are a few guidelines to keep in mind when trying to move the organization to the next level: