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SharePoint 2010 offers tremendous capabilities for improving information access; however, a well-thought out information architecture is key to user acceptance.

In this webinar, Seth Earley provides an overview of "information architecture" concepts and their importance to SharePoint projects. You will also learn about the skills and tools needed to be successful; as well as about available training for developing information architecture skills.

Seth is joined by Steve Pogrebivsky, CEO and co-founder of MetaVis. Steve will provide his perspective on how tools like the MetaVis Architect help information architects rapidly configure SharePoint sites.

Learn more about the course including upcoming dates and cities.

As information professionals, we are always looking for industry trends that will benefit from established methodologies but also drive innovation.   Right now,  one to watch is mHealth, the delivery of mobile applications to health professionals and patients (all of us!).

The mHealth revolution is expected to transform the patient experience and revolutionize the way patients interface with their health practitioners and manage their own personal care. The mHealth movement is expected to affect many areas of the healthcare ecosystem, especially where patients are concerned, such as admitting, scheduling, tracking, monitoring, imaging, as well as patient health records and wellness services.

This is an area with significant information management challenges. Companies need to make commitments to “evolving” standards in order to position for early entry.  They need flexible solutions so that they can rapidly adopt to new standards. 

In this session, researchers from Compass Intelligence will explore a number of key mHealth trends expected to impact the patient experience over the next 3 to 5 years.  Seth Earley will provide insights on the relevance of information management practices to enable effective solutions in this new application space.  In addition, he will identify areas of expected innovation, necessary to support market growth. Dr. Christian Reich, will provide his perspective on these important trends

Taxonomy and metadata management are critical to ensuring enterprise data quality.  Robust data quality is a prerequisite for creating trusted and optimized data applications, both for internal tasks (such as business intelligence) and customer-facing applications (such as e-commerce websites).  In this session, we look at approaches for cleansing, harmonizing and creating data structures for data that is below required quality thresholds.  This webinar uses as an example product data quality, but has broad applicability to master data management (MDM) in general.

Seth Earley provides an industry perspective focusing on the business need for taxonomy and metadata management to MDM.

Rennie Walker discusses a recent large-scale product data quality project for a major retailer.  This segment of the webinar offers insights into methodology, approaches to project design, governance and lessons learned.  In addition, Rennie addresses the capabilities and functionalities of data quality tools, using Oracle's PDQ (Product Data Quality) suite as an example.

There are many tools and technologies out there that provide the ability to upgrade or migrate to SharePoint 2010. While the promise of simply “pushing” a button to move our content from one instance to another sounds intriguing, preparing for a successful migration requires a well thought out strategy that includes answers to questions like:

• Is merely migrating and recreating the existing user experience the best approach for your organization?
• How well does your current information architecture support findability through search and navigation?
• Are you employing the use of content types and site columns to manage your information?
• How well does your taxonomy fit your information organization and access requirements?

Fundamental changes in the way you manage your information architecture from the perspective of your content must take place in order to fully leverage new product capability like that offered by the Managed Metadata Service and the Term Store Management Tool. This simple “copy and paste” approach will not deliver the foundation necessary to utilize these functions and therefore certain levels of design effort is required if improvements to information management and findability are what you seek.

Please join us for this insightful session in which  Seth Earley and Jeff Carr discuss the processes that need to be put into place in order to fully leverage the capabilities of SharePoint 2010.  In addition, our special guest, Will Henderson of Winter Park Construction, will talk about how they successfully migrated to SharePoint 2010.

In this session, Dr Christian Reich provides an overview of how the management of data in the Healthcare industry has evolved over the years from billing and administrative applications to patient tracking, medical records and laboratory data applications.  Throughout this process there have been numerous barriers to adoption and integration of information management applications – from incentives and business models to challenges around poor user interfaces, entrenched practices and processes, competing standards and lack of defined infrastructure.  The industry is driven by higher costs – the greater the costs, the greater the revenue and higher corresponding profits for all parties – from insurance companies (higher premiums and payouts) to providers (higher top line revenue).

With the current models and drivers, we are on a path to health care costs becoming up to 35% of gross domestic product by 2050.  This means that one third of the entire economy will be healthcare related.  This is clearly unsustainable.  There are high expectations that information technology will solve many of the problems around the cost of healthcare.  However, numerous obstacles to adoption exist. 

We’ll discuss various programs that are addressing challenges including:

• Stimulus funds devoted to EHR adoption
• Office of The National Coordinator for Healthcare IT
• Interoperability standards programs
• National Health Information Network
• The Healthcare Information Technology Standards Panel

The session will explore the need for consistent terminology and data to support efforts to improve quality, support evidence based medicine, improve clinical trials data and to realize the future promise of personalized medicine. 

Ford Foundation is one of the world's largest philanthropic organizations.   Each year the Foundation receives about 44,000 grant proposals and since its inception has distributed about $16 Billion in grants world wide.  Our guest speaker this month is Nicki Lodico, Manager of Information Management at Ford Foundation.  In this session Ms. Lodico discusses the challenges that the FF faced and the tools and techniques that were used to create a system in SharePoint that works well to support the organization's goals. 

Session agenda:

• The Problem – Information Management Challenges
• Developing an Information Management Strategy
  • Steps to the process
  • Example IM Lifecycles
  • Findings and Recommendations
• Project approach
• Taxonomy, metadata and IA for SharePoint

Although many of the challenges that the FF encountered were SharePoint specific this insightful case study provides a detailed look at the process of developing and implementing a content strategy.

Each quarter we take a little time to go over the basics.  What is a taxonomy, how does it help and how can you develop one?   Our next monthly taxonomy webinar will go through a high level review of the basics of taxonomy definition and development:

• Taxonomy definition
• Taxonomy applications
• User requirements
• The role of use cases
• Creating a domain model
• Vocabulary development
• Maintenance processes
• Governance Framework

We’ll discuss the role of taxonomies in master data management, information architecture and search integration. 

Be sure to join us for this informative overview of taxonomy principles.  Bring your colleagues and managers.  They’ll walk away with a better understanding of how the organization can begin the taxonomy process.

Look at the most successful organizations and what stands out is an ability to react quickly to changing markets. This agility is the result of ensuring that business processes, workflows, and communications between business groups move freely. The structure and integration created by the implementation of taxonomy are the building blocks for improving efficiency and collaboration. Taxonomy provides the organizational concepts and content categorization that set a business’s pace for information organization, access, findability, and reuse. These improvements lead to reduced costs for delivering services, developing products and conducting operations.

How can taxonomy impact the bottom line of your organization? What are the advantages of taxonomy vs. technology solutions for improving knowledge flow? Join Earley & Associates Senior Consultant, Seth Maislin, for a sixty-minute rundown of the theory, practice and business benefits of taxonomy. You’ll come away with 5 best practices, drawn from real world experience in a wide variety of industries, to boost your bottom line and beat the competition through taxonomy design and semantic integration. And bring your manager - taxonomy design and integration projects are among the most cost effective and unobtrusive ways you can boost your bottom line while beating the competition.

We‘ve been delivering taxonomy presentations and workshops over the past 15 years and sometimes forget to go over the basics.  What is a taxonomy, how does it help and how can you develop one?   Our next monthly taxonomy webinar will go through a high level review of the basics of taxonomy definition and development:

• Taxonomy definition
• Taxonomy applications
• User requirements
• The role of use cases
• Creating a domain model
• Vocabulary development
• Maintenance processes
• Governance Framework

We’ll discuss the role of taxonomies in master data management, information architecture and search integration. 

Be sure to join us for this informative overview of taxonomy principles.  Bring your colleagues and managers.  They’ll walk away with a better understanding of how the organization can begin the taxonomy process.

Look at the most successful organizations and what stands out is an ability to react quickly to changing markets. This agility is the result of ensuring that business processes, workflows, and communications between business groups move freely. The structure and integration created by the implementation of taxonomy are the building blocks for improving efficiency and collaboration. Taxonomy provides the organizational concepts and content categorization that set a business’s pace for information organization, access, findability, and reuse. These improvements lead to reduced costs for delivering services, developing products and conducting operations. How can taxonomy impact the bottom line of your organization? What are the advantages of taxonomy vs. technology solutions for improving knowledge flow? Join Earley & Associates CEO Seth Earley for a sixty-minute rundown of the theory, practice and business benefits of taxonomy. You’ll come away with 5 best practices, drawn from real world experience in a wide variety of industries, to boost your bottom line and beat the competition through taxonomy design and semantic integration. And bring your manager - taxonomy design and integration projects are among the most cost effective and unobtrusive ways you can boost your bottom line while beating the competition.

The need to repurpose content through multiple digital channels gives rise to the need to track and manage rights.  It’s no longer sufficient to treat content rights as the legal department’s problem or to confine rights information to a spreadsheet or desktop database.  At the same time, rights information management is no longer just a back-office overhead process: done right, it’s a way to enable new revenue opportunities through content while minimizing legal risk as well as administrative costs.

In this informative session we will explore the changes in the digital media supply chain and expose the challenges and issues around systematic rights information management.  Using parallels from digital asset management, we will offer approaches to building structured rights information and show how they can add increasing value within a fragmented distribution environment.   We will also note key industry initiatives illustrating the way leading media companies are approaching the issue.

David Roth from MISI Company will discuss Crafting and managing effective cross channel brand experiences requires adherence to some guiding principles. Those principles include having a clear understanding of the experience you are trying to create, understanding the people you are creating the experience for, aligning your company’s people and systems around the facilitation of that experience, and putting in place effective systems of governance, measurement and continuous improvement. In this  webinar he will discuss the importance of adhering to these key principles and outline some basic techniques for doing so. 

Special attention will then be paid to a critical component of consistent, cost-efficient management of cross channel experiences: marketing asset management.

Seth Maislin and Gordon Castle from Earley & Associates, Inc. will discuss Digital asset management and marketing asset management is becoming an essential component of cross channel marketing programs. In many organizations the responsibility for creating marketing assets is decentralized and siloed by channel. One group is working on email marketing, another on web commerce, others on social media and still other groups on more traditional print and broadcast. A centralized, taxonomy-driven repository is foundational for building capabilities of re-use and evaluation in the brand management space.

Learn how to bring together multiple existing taxonomies for unified use. Most organizations today have multiple repositories in place; a single system environment is increasingly rare. As a result, more taxonomies are being created, but these vocabularies need to be combined or merged, whether to create a unified enterprise taxonomy from those of separate departments, to bring together taxonomies resulting from acquisitions of companies or product lines, or to reconcile folksonomies with taxonomies. This session looks at three key ways that taxonomies may be combined for different purposes: integrating, merging, or mapping.

Taxonomy plays a critical role in user experience, but how can it manage content when access and information needs differ across a vast user base? How do you effectively offer information and resources in a meaningful way, through one portal, and to all users? This session will address how to optimize user satisfaction by leveraging taxonomy to catalog users in the same way we use taxonomies to classify knowledge assets. We will discuss how to determine and prioritize differing content needs, push dynamic content based on user profiles, and present a customized information architecture that makes it intuitive for users to target the information that best serves their unique purpose.

An ontology is both a flexible and exciting way to organize information. In this session, we will discuss such issues as bridging concepts amongst taxonomy, thesauri, and ontology, the details of ontology representation in RDF/OWL, implementing ontologies within systems, and use cases for how ontologies are being used for systems integration and vocabulary mapping.

Many organizations have turned to component-oriented content to create more sophisticated knowledge products, in more languages, at lower cost. For most organizations these days, component content is achieved by using DITA, the Darwin Information Typing Architecture. Finding content in your file system or content repository is hard enough when you’ve got simple text documents to deal with. When you’re using DITA and other component-oriented methods, you increase the difficulty by two or three orders of magnitude, because you’re looking for smaller needles in bigger haystacks. It’s logical that DITA users would turn to taxonomy and metadata to improve findability of their reusable content.

In addition to presenting results around maturity levels, this call will benchmark current search, taxonomy, and metadata practices against the 2005 survey and report on some surprising key findings around information access and best practices adoption.

Managing taxonomies on a global scale presents new challenges. How are terms localized and translated?Who has responsibility for changes and updates? How can differences in culture and the nuances of meaning be handled from one language and locale to another? Even subtle variations in meaning and interpretation can have far reaching implications for your taxonomy processes.

Auto tagging is one of those areas that has been full of promise, yet fallen short of expectations. Over the years, vendors have developed various approaches to deriving and applying metadata to content but some require more effort (such as development of large training sets) than manual tagging would. However, algorithms have gotten better and engines smarter and there are new approaches to auto tagging that we will explore.

SharePoint can leverage taxonomies in a number of ways – through column definitions and content types, through physical organizations of libraries and through logical classification of collections.  In this session, we’ll explore the ramifications of several design decisions and how to maintain consistent classifications in your SharePoint repositories.  You’ll see examples of wireframes for MOSS 2007 and where taxonomies are surfaced to enhance content findability.  We’ll also discuss some of the challenges and limitations of SharePoint search and how to address these in your deployments. 

We’ll consider taxonomy from a holistic perspective of content and content management strategy. What does a content management strategy mean?  Is it the business strategy and how business needs are supported by content? The strategy for developing content, messaging and branding?  Is it the technical strategy for implementing the CMS? Taxonomy, classification and metadata have an important role supporting each of these perspectives.

Both taxonomy and SEO are about semantics, keywords, terminology and metadata and about deriving intent from ambiguity.  Many organizations are doing work to understand how users think about internal and external content from a taxonomy, metadata and content management perspective.  Other groups are engaging agencies and SEO specialists in improving organic search rankings.  However, SEO and taxonomy are not always considered from a holistic perspective.

When creating navigational taxonomies, we all know that no first draft will ever be perfect. Multiple users and multiple perspectives make navigational taxonomies especially difficult to construct. In this session we will talk about the value of engaging taxonomy end users in both the design and testing phases of taxonomy development.

This session will cover the different set of deliverables produced in getting a taxonomy project started and how Mike Gardner worked with the repository teams to define their requirements for metadata and the types of documentation he used to do this. Also hear from Rachel Lovinger on how to represent metadata for better project communication.

How do you explain the value of taxonomy projects in the era of "just get Google"? Taxonomy and metadata standards projects can be abstract and difficult to explain. However, unless you are able to clearly convey the value of this work it will be challenging, if not impossible, to obtain organizational support and resources. This session is a must for anyone struggling with gaining buy-in for their taxonomy and information architecture programs.

Taxonomies are a fundamental part of the semantic web: machine-readable hierarchies that enable intelligent agents to make logical inferences, making information retrieval an entirely new experience. This session will cover ways in which the semantic web can be used to enhance websites and discuss moving beyond traditional search in practical applications of the semantic web in industry and government.

This session will explore the role of facets in organizing and accessing content. We’ll start with an overview of faceted search and then hear from Peter Bell, one of the founders of Endeca, a faceted search company, about new developments in the field that allow a combination of unstructured and structured tagging and classification.

In our global business environment, it often isn't enough to derive a taxonomy in English. Frequently, international businesses and websites now need multilingual taxonomies, or local language variations. This session will discuss strategies, solutions, and describe case studies about how to manage multi-lingual taxonomies.

Hear how taxonomy projects are essential to knowledge management initiatives, and learn how to apply thesaurus structures to improve the findability of explicit knowledge, and the ability to locate and leverage tacit expertise.

Speakers will focus on the need to define context and process, and how to apply taxonomies to effectively support KM.

Whether you like it or not, you won't be deriving your taxonomies in a vacuum. During the development process, you often have to collaborate and integrate with related projects in the enterprise, such as web design, search engine optimization, e-commerce, and enterprise architecture. So how do you keep in alignment with all these other workstreams and keep your project on plan? Our speakers in this session will cover strategies to help you achieve a smooth integration.

Bringing a taxonomy to life is not an easy job. Operationalization often requires juggling multiple perspectives, such as those of designers, content publishers, application developers, not to mention consumers. These groups all have different views on what taxonomy is, how it should be applied, managed, and integrated. So, knowing this, how do you roll your taxonomy to the enterprise? This session will present taxonomy operationalization strategies that take into account this multiplicity of views.

Your company has recognized the value of classification. Now, what is involved in keeping a taxonomy project afloat and relevant? Who does what? When should it be done? Who makes decisions? This session will cover important issues in governance roles, policies, structures, and strategies.

Topic maps provide a compelling application for aiding knowledge discovery of content that is related without common sets of metadata. This presentation will kick off with a thorough introduction to the origin of topic maps, including the evolution of SGML to XML. We will progress into examples of topic maps in practical use by a variety of industries and finish with a discussion on the interdependencies of topic maps, taxonomies, and OWL.

How do we measure the value of a taxonomy? Taxonomies are often far removed from actual business processes, and if we measure an "indicator", it's difficult to link the result directly to the taxonomy. With case studies and real world examples, this session will cover a variety of qualitative and quantitative methods to evaluate the success and appropriateness of your taxonomy.

How do you define Semantic Technology? This presentation addresses a number of important topics surrounding practical applications, including the impact on content management, knowledge management, and collaboration tools, how these technologies relate to taxonomies and thesauri, and short term enterprise considerations.

In this session we'll learn how tow large organizations deal with governance policies, and processes.

We'll hear Christine Connors of Raytheon and Marti Heyman of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu about how they deal with governance and how governance policies will vary depending on the phase of the taxonomy program (creation, implementation, maintenance) and the size of the project. 

One of the goals of a taxonomy is to improve search. Some search vendors have tools that either generate taxonomies based on content or group documents into clusters based on taxonomic terms. The goal is to improve the ability to extract meaningful structure from a body of content. Search and classification tools are getting better at this... But how good are they really? What are the considerations? What works and what doesn't work?