Bite-sized Taxonomy Boot Camp's Taxonomy Practitioner of the Year Award is designed to highlight the very best practitioners working with taxonomies today, and is given to someone who’s gone the extra mile to support their organisation with taxonomies.
The winner of Bite-sized Taxonomy Boot Camp’s 2024 Taxonomy Practitioner of the Year Award was Amy Funderburk, Chief Corporate Taxonomist at SAP SE, Germany
Amy's entry described a situation where taxonomy at SAP was faced with 25 years of legacy product data housed in more than 70 systems. Over a period of 6 months, Amy developed a unique methodology called "Brand ID" that brings together key product data from top source systems which are automatically updated and accessible by channels using a dedicated API. She worked with marketing technology and IT colleagues to develop a new Taxonomy Worksphere repository that can be maintained by Amy and her Corporate Taxonomy team.
The Corporate Taxonomy team is one person (Amy), supported by one intern, and with two colleague volunteers interested in the topic. There was no budget. So with little resources and no budget, Amy was able to create a true product taxonomy for a portfolio in a repository that will eventually include more than 5,000 active products and solutions.
The judges praised the excellent application describing in detail going from a "Wild West" of chaos, to a well ordered system, despite working with no budget. The nomination impressed the judges because of the complexity, size, and age of the organisation and how those factors would contribute to making taxonomy work extremely challenging. The magnitude of setting up a "single, comprehensive structure" in an organisation the size of SAP is impressive. Furthermore, the cross-team work as well as the internal and external use spoke to a wide-reaching impact and scope.