Solution

The Content Management Solution

EIS workshops were held across the e-business group. Seth’s workshops helped raise the level of understanding not only about taxonomies but also about how and why having one would be important.

The Director was pleased with the participants’ reactions. “There was a broad range of expertise around taxonomy, search and content management. One unit was very good at working with search logs and updating their search engines with frequently used terms and creating synonym rings while other units were completely clueless. The people who were clueless found it interesting and wanted to know more. The people who were more knowledgeable were glad to see that other people were thinking about content issues too especially at the corporate level.”

EIS also conducted interviews within and outside corporate to understand more about how content was being searched and used and how that fit into the business strategies.

After detailed analysis of the data including the implementation of tools, which are part of his methodology, Seth compiled a preliminary report and what the director describes as ‘a high level road map along with a list of viable corporate facets’.

“I was really looking for the taxonomy on a corporate level for people to understand that they need to structure and tag their content so that it can be shared across lines of business. And we got that,” he explains.

Implementation and Measuring the Success of Taxonomy

The e-business group is moving forward with the implementation of their content management strategy based on the work delivered by the EIS team. They are realistic in thinking that this is a long-term strategic effort that will result in improvements over several years.

There has been significant positive impact in the very short term, however. The Director reports that having a taxonomy has given the group’s vision higher credibility because it is based on a methodology and a clear a path to get there.

“Having this taxonomy ended any sort of arguments and discussions because we had something solid to work with. It wasn’t just a lump of clay; it was actually a formed vase or structure.  That made it easy so we could just move forward and concentrate on the next steps.”

As plans shape for next year, the taxonomy will be tested and refined from both internal and external perspectives.  “The biggest improvement we are hoping for is on ‘Search’. The current search does not perform very well and that’s going to be a big thing because is user’s gateway to the content,” remarks the Director.

Results

Over and above the expected internal and external benefits of the taxonomy, e-business expects a big business value win. With the structured content management systems and tools, millions of hits a day will be impacted by improving search and navigation. For example, millions of incremental dollars a year could be generated by improving access to even just one product like auto insurance.  Providing equally excellent access to other products could leverage literally millions in incremental revenue and substantially more qualified leads worldwide.