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Using words to refer to things may seem like a simple concept, but can be amazingly complex. My youngest granddaughter is approaching her second birthday and takes great delight in naming things, especially the animals on her alphabet flash cards. Yet, as a writer friend of mine observed recently, ‘The taxonomy of real life is not as ordered as the books we are weaned on would have us believe.’
Within organizations, taxonomies get complex very quickly — especially as we develop different functional viewpoints, adding industry terminology, process and technology terms, and even the words our customers use. I recently completed a taxonomy rationalization project where I uncovered over 2,700 words employees used to describe or label various products and activities. Only 3% were commonly used by more than one functional group.
It seemed each area of the company was happy developing its own internal language, so why even start a taxonomy rationalization project? Aligning your taxonomy can help on a number of fronts. It can:
- Improve communications.
- Enable information to be found more easily.
- Allow systems to share information.
- Make translations easier and cheaper.
- Improve navigation.
- Support automation of multi-channel content delivery.
- Enable analytics around information and content usage.
- Provide a more consistent customer experience.
Let’s take a more detailed look at each of these benefits:
Improve Communications
Your organization undoubtedly has a wide variety of documents, images, videos — maybe even audio — that relate to the products or services it supplies. It's also highly probable that different departments or groups refer to the same, or similar, items or processes with different terms that are specific to their own function. This can make internal communication chaotic and inefficient. By creating a taxonomy of agreed terms that are adopted across the organization, you can remove those roadblocks to communication, improve productivity and build a more collaborative environment where everyone is speaking the same language.
Enable Information to Be Found More Easily
Having content spread around the organization is like being in a library where books are in random piles instead of organized on shelves. In this scenario, it would be almost impossible to find a particular piece of information unless you had prior knowledge of where it was. Too many organizations rely on individuals with just this sort of experience-based institutional knowledge. Developing a taxonomy and using it to correctly label your content assets is the equivalent of putting the books back on the shelves. It makes finding the right information more efficient for anyone in your organization who needs to access content.
Related Article: You've Got a Taxonomy. But Can You Find What You're Looking For?
Allow Systems to Share Information
The information included in your content assets isn't only useful for human consumption — it benefits your business systems, and machine learning algorithms need access too. In the rationalization project mentioned earlier, we discovered an address was tagged in 12 different ways. Every system used different names for the fields on an address form. Developing a common taxonomy for your data is as critical as developing one for your content. With common consistent data fields and labels, your business systems can find, link and exchange information seamlessly.
Make Translations Easier and Cheaper
If you have a hard time navigating your content due to conflicting terminology, imagine what it is like for a colleague who speaks a different language or has a different cultural background. Creating a taxonomy with fixed consistent terms makes it easier to translate your content when needed. It also reduces the number of times that similar terms or concepts need to be translated because they have used different words to describe the same thing. A consistent vocabulary means quicker, more consistent translation at less cost. This is essential for communications within a multi-lingual, multicultural organization.
Related Article: How Well Do You Understand Your Content Processing Pipeline?
Improve Navigation
Do the names and labels used on your internal systems match those on your external facing websites and your mobile apps? Do the printed field names on your internal forms match the instructions on your corporate intranet? Such mismatches make it difficult to navigate your internal systems or communicate with customers. It can also open a company up for liability risks. Building a common taxonomy will minimize such risks and make it easier for employees to navigate your digital properties.
Support Automation of Multi-Channel Content Delivery
We now need to deliver our content across all of the different platforms where people are working. These can range from desktop computers to mobile devices, watches, even glasses. Once you add a mix of websites, apps, social media platforms, audio, video, animation and text potentially in different languages, content delivery becomes exponentially more complex.
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Producing standalone content assets for each of these delivery channels at scale is no longer an economically viable approach for internal communications teams. A common taxonomy and tagging model allows comms to create a piece of content once, independent of its eventual output format, store it in a database, and then use the consistent content labeling to find and extract what they need, using smart publishing tools to assemble the content for delivery. A taxonomy is a foundational part of moving delivery of content from a traditional push model, to a flexible automated pull model.
Related Article: Ensuring Internal Communications Are Heard in an Increasingly Complex Landscape
Enable Analytics Around Information and Content Usage
I’m often asked “How can we measure the quality of our content?” and “How do we know if anyone is actually reading what we publish?” Analytical tools that track and report on what happens to our content once we publish it can provide the answers to these questions. Is it being read and engaged with? With a consistent defined taxonomy, we can build a tagging structure that allows us to find and extract data, then develop custom segments your analytics tools can use to understand what is happening to your content both internally and externally. That way, you will gain the insights needed to answer those two questions and many others.
In short, having a taxonomy for our internal content makes us more organized, efficient and productive. It also enables our systems to communicate and provides a foundation for emerging technologies. But perhaps, as my granddaughter likes to demonstrate, it helps us communicate clearly and without ambiguity.
