Wednesday, November 5, 2014

Forrester Research reports that “29% of the global workforce (and rising) are anytime, anywhere information workers – those who use three or more devices, work from multiple locations, and use many apps.” We live in an era of the Intranet of Everywhere, and success is reserved for those who embrace it. During this high-impact talk, Tetu shares proven strategies that empower success:

• Letting workers use the tools and channels they prefer, while ensuring that the knowledge they create with those tools is well organized and easily findable by colleagues
• Gaining a unified, real-time view of all your company’s diverse knowledge streams, and understand the “who, what, when, where, and why” of each knowledge asset
• Automatically identifying subject-matter experts based upon automated analysis of all your knowledge assets and systems
• Unburdening teams from the never-ending task of manually tagging, cleansing, and de-duping your enterprise data

Selling Sameness in an Era of Exceptionalism

Notions of exceptionalism and personalization are prominent in our society and in our workplace. Even when purchasing the same products or performing the same jobs, we are compelled to stand out, to differ, to be the exception to the rule. Social media has allowed us to define our own terms and hashtags even as more “traditional” purveyors of controlled vocabularies demand rigor and term standardization as a basis for findability. Are these trends at odds? Learn how to address these challenges in an organization and what methods work to navigate these seemingly conflicting currents.

Taxonomy & Social Media: New Types & Uses for Social Taxonomies

The dramatic increase in social media content and, particularly, the move to integrate that content with traditional enterprise content, offers taxonomists new challenges and new opportunities. The challenges include huge increases in both the amount and the variety or lack of structure in that content. This is often coupled with a decrease in the size of individual content items. Another major challenge is that this content is typically used for different purposes than traditional enterprise content. This talk, which is based on two recent social media projects, looks at a range of issues and the potential solutions and implications for taxonomists. These issues include: developing content taxonomies for consumption by social communities (broad, general taxonomies coupled with a way to deal with short-lived but very specific emerging topics); combining content taxonomies with structures to model the social dimensions associated with the content (emotion, business and personal skills, and even narrative structures); community-based taxonomies; and finally, the need to work with new partners in marketing and sales, which entails learning to “speak social.” The overall lesson learned is that taxonomists have a lot to offer to the world of social media but need to broaden their horizons to do so.

You’re It, and That’s Awesome: Gamified Content Tagging

The important job of correctly tagging content often falls on individuals who didn’t choose to be taggers. But that’s OK. The bigger problem is that many content authors just don’t see the fun in it. Using gamification best practices and principles, Maislin shows how, with proper socialization and implementation, metadata tagging can be not just fun but also an enriching experience to those who have to get it done. And the timing is perfect, too, as Gartner predicts that by 2015 gamification will be the primary mechanism used by 40% of Fortune 1000 companies to transform business operations.

As product differentiation diminishes in many markets, companies are increasingly investing in the customer experience as a competitive advantage. Winning organizations have decision making processes and feedback mechanisms that enable them to experiment and respond quickly to their evolving market landscape. They have also taken action to make their full portfolio of product and customer information accessible to their customer-facing processes. Earley looks at which Fortune 1000 companies are winning the customer experience arms race and how they are doing it; and provides ways to frame the needs and opportunities to senior leadership.

Developing Use Cases Before Developing the Taxonomy

Use cases, user stories, and user tasks are what drive feature development in the agile method. It is critical that taxonomy be included as a component in agile development and tracking software such as Jira. However, often use cases are no more than functional requirements, e.g., “the taxonomy should improve content findability”; a use case should ideally define a set of steps with a sufficient level of detail to be able to accomplish a task. For example, a use case should explicitly show how a taxonomy would improve findability, such as by providing assisted navigation with fly-out or cascading lists. Discovering use cases at the start of an information management project can help avoid costly mistakes or unhappy clients when taxonomy deliverables are presented. Showing wireframe examples with descriptions of the user steps can also be helpful in documenting and communicating use cases. This presentation discusses why you should, and how you can readily, develop use cases and supporting documentation, using examples from clients such as the Environmental Protection Agency, Dell, and the American Physical Society.

Easy Taxonomies: Win-Win for All Involved

Cargill recognized the expertise it had among its 140,000-plus employees world- wide and wanted a way to make everyone’s skills more widely known throughout the organization. Building a new people profiling system that was easy for individuals to complete and update meant developing a taxonomy to underpin the effort. How could the organization create some degree of uniformity by putting a name to what people do and know without frustrating individuals who can’t find an adequate description or winding up with too many descriptions for similar expertise? This presentation describes the process taken by Cargill’s knowledge management team, purchasing a commercial taxonomy and asking students enrolled in a knowledge management (KM) class to assist in building out the taxonomy. The presentation is designed as a practical “how-to” from the corporate side, as well as for the students/instructor. The assignment allowed dual degree M.B.A.-M.S.I.S. students to see how taxonomies are put into practice in organizations and have real consequences. A homework assignment to “find a taxonomy” became a multi-week project for teams of students who consulted existing taxonomies in key areas for Cargill, developing secondary and tertiary levels for several top term hierarchies. Learn how Cargill is promoting the new People Profile system, encouraging employees to complete their profiles, and see how the system has developed. Hear what works in terms of graduate student involvement.

The Rocky Marriage of Taxonomy & Technology

Creating an enterprise-wide taxonomy is one thing; creating one that can be used in an information management application is another. Speakers share lessons learned during the rapid development and implementation of multiple company-wide taxonomies in different applications as part of separate projects to facilitate cross-departmental collaboration and information sharing. They address what to know before you start, critical taxonomy considerations, and keys to user adoption and success.

Best Practices in Taxonomy Development

The theory of taxonomy development is foundational in the field of Library Science, but how does the theory transform into the pragmatic approach demanded by the workplace? Once the library student becomes a librarian tasked with drafting a taxonomy, the practical application of library school theories can be daunting. However, creating a taxonomy is simple once a process is established and followed. This presentation, based on the publication of the same name, provides guidance to first time taxonomy developers through a set of recommended steps, including Identifying Your Content, Identifying Your Audience, Letting the Content Lead, Identifying Your Structure, Identifying Your Terms, and Throwing Out Lifelines. The transition from theory to reality is not insurmountable. The aspiring taxonomist must remain composed and work through the process established through the practice points. The result will be a taxonomy functional for the website and patrons.

Spotlight on Taxonomy for Theatre Professionals

When a theatre develops a production, what electronic files are created? Construction drawings, visualization files, imagery and documentation for scenic design, costume sketches, and light plots are just a few of the many types of information that must be stored, tracked, and retrieved for accurate production management. Most often, creative artists are not concerned with standardized methods of storing and cataloging their materials. Many show files exist on individual hard drives that are scattered across the organization or uploaded to a shared file server on the network without thought to retrieval, version management, or efficient information sharing down the road. What attributes or metadata would assist designers, builders, stage managers, and others who work with them to easily identify which files are current, valid, and most useful for their need at that phase in a production? Modernizing IT practices by using classification techniques along with standardized information processes tailored to production methodologies can revolutionize the technical theatrical experience and speed production by minimizing miscommunication and ensuring better quality of the end result. This session presents research and use cases discovered and documented during the past year with an eye toward developing a Common Artistic Theatre Taxonomy (CATT) as an application that can address universal business cases that commonly surface in theatrical production scenarios.

Advances in Accessing Art Online

At the 2013 Taxonomy Boot Camp conference, Clarke delivered a talk that surveyed the state of public access to art on the web by examining the online offerings of six brick-and-mortar art museums and four virtual galleries, with particular emphasis on the use of taxonomy to improve search and browse access. The session ended by drawing attention to two areas that required further research. This complementary “part two” presentation discusses some of the particular challenges posed by access to large or complex images and issues relating to derivative digital versions. It provides an update on recent advances in accessing and presenting art online, with a special focus on the use of linked data.

Ten years ago, the panelists were all speakers at the first Taxonomy Boot Camp. This year, for the tenth anniversary of the event, they look back at developments over those 10 years to draw some lessons learned and insights from the world of taxonomy, and use those to look into the future to see where we may be 10 years from now. Come to this session to find out what went right and wrong in the past 10 years and what you can expect to see happening in the world of taxonomies by 2024!!