The Case for Developing an Enterprise Information Architecture

If your organiation has the need to find pertinent content quickly, not return 1000's or 100's of rows of information during a search, leverage content to assist in making decisions and/or use content to guide customers, then your organization has a need for an Enterprise information Architecture!

Below is a brief description of the Enterprise Information Architecture document that is the primary mechanism to communicate the purpose, scope and organization of information within the enterprise:

Brief Description

The Enterprise Information Architecture is a business driven process that details the enterprise's information strategies, its extended information value chain, and the impact on technical architecture.

Purpose

The purpose of the Information Architecture document is to clearly capture the decisions concerning the data and their relationships that support the information infrastructure knowledge and content within the enterprise.

Scope

The information architecture represents the organization of information/content which includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, Images, etc., to maximize the information’s usability, manageability and improve search capabilities. This document is a living document that will be modified to detail the decisions made during the content delivery process (audit, migration, creation, metadata tagging). This document presents a detailed Enterprise Information Model that describes the relationships of information, information sources, and is a key to metadata identification and repository site structure creation and taxonomy. This document will also include details concerning information business rules, records management, controlled vocabulary (glossary), information security and information governance.

The information model will:

• Support the metadata that will be used to characterize the content
• Support organization/taxonomy of content in knowledge repositories and document libraries
• Support templates to use for creating content
• Serves as the information structure enabling search and “findability”
• Support how tools such as SharePoint, eGain, and SalesForce.com is organized into a hierarchy of landing pages, site collections and sub-sites
• Support how the hierarchy is exposed in the site’s navigation features
• Contributes to enterprise search engine optimization (SEO)

If your organization is considering implementing or has implemented an enterprise information architecture and/or enterprise information model I would like for you to share your experiences. Also, join me at the KM World Taxonomy Boot Camp in October in Washington DC later this year!

KM in Specific Industries

Over the next few weeks I will examine several industries in which knowledge management (KM) is making an impact. I will take a brief look at Customer Service Centers, Research Institutions, Talent Management, Legal Institutions and the Military. In this blog post I will take a look at what’s happening with KM as it pertains to Customer Service Centers.

Customer Service Centers are looking to leverage their knowledge assets, KM processes and tools in order to get knowledge to the customer service rep to convey to the customer or directly to the customer in a timely manner. The KM concepts of collaboration through live chat, content management and search as well as KM workflows and expertise locators to enable the “right” resources to solve customer problems are being deployed.

Used properly, knowledge assets with the proper KM tools will enable the customer service centers to not only answer customer questions and solve problems but also increase sales and customer satisfaction through an improved customer experience. KM being leveraged at Customer Service Centers achieve the following:

Lower service cost by reducing repeat calls, call handling/resolution times, and brings down the cost of agent training

Better Quality of Service, Customers are more likely to receive the right answers faster

Consistency in service, with the right KM processes, procedures and tools in place KM ensures that customers with the same question receive the same response, regardless of agent as well as interaction channel or mode

Speaking of tools, some of the tools being utilized for KM in Customer Service Centers include salesforce.com, Kana, and SharePoint. In considering the use of these tools organizations must understand first their knowledge management strategy, how such tools fit within the KM strategy as well as their specific requirements for using one or more of these tools. Keep in mind that if multiple tools are being used to deliver on the KM Strategy your organization should look at ways to integrate the tools in order to deliver consistency in response and service to the customer.

For those organizations leveraging KM or want to utilize KM as part of your Customer Service Center solution I want to hear from you. I look forward to knowing more about what is happening at your Customer Service Centers.

Tools for Implementing Taxonomy and Search Capabilities

Continuing our conversation about building a better search using taxonomies, ontologies, content types, and metadata; the following represents a few tools to consider if we every hope to not only find information on our knowledge repositories but to provide solutions to our inquiries.

Knowledge Management Suite for SharePoint 2010 from Layre2 is focused on improved content tagging and discovery. Although this product has not been rated with any reviews it promises to deliver many features that a taxonomy structure will be able to take advantage of. These features include:
- Tag Suggester: While tagging an item or document, display a suggestion list based on given Term Store taxonomies, tagging rules, item properties, context and document content.
- Auto Tagger: Tag items and documents in background without any user interaction, based on given Term Store taxonomies, tagging rules, item properties, context and document content. Auto Tagger could be helpful for initial tagging, e.g. after content migration from any system to SharePoint 2010, as well as for daily background operation.
- Taxonomy Manager: Manage the Term Store with additional managed metadata properties (e.g. tagging rules, related tags), export and import, change management, workflows.
- Tag Navigation Web Part: Provides collaborative tagging by using the SharePoint 2010 managed metadata taxonomy tree directly for content discovery and navigation.
- Tag Directory Web Part: Render the SharePoint 2010 managed metadata taxonomy tree as flat A-Z directory category index directly for content discovery and navigation.
- Tag Cloud Web Part: Navigate the content by its importance using a familiar taxonomy-based tag cloud.
- Related Content Web Part: Automatically display related content in a given context using managed metadata.
B y the way Layre2 provides shareware (free) version of there Knowledge Management Suite.

Word Map Taxonomy Management Software
Wordmap's software enables organizations to develop classification schemes or taxonomies, upload and store documents by reference to them, then publish rich information resources for their users to search and navigate. Using taxonomies and classification schemes enables the Taxonomy Management Software to provide structured to content enabling precise and relevant answers to searches quickly. Some World Map Taxonomy Software clients include AstraZeneca and the Harvard Business School. The complete product set can be deployed standalone - or easily integrated to improve the performance and consistency of existing systems. Learn more about the Word Map Search Integration Framework and how it connects enterprise applications such as SharePoint & Endeca to centralized taxonomy management.

Data Harmony: Expert Knowledge Management with Powerful Semantic Tools and Intelligent Design
Data Harmony software indicates that it provides knowledge management solutions to organize your information resources by applying a taxonomy/thesaurus structure. Data Harmony's software tools enable you to construct a logical framework of topics, reflecting the vocabulary of your business or subject area - and then apply these topic terms to your resources precisely and consistently.

Data Harmony tools include:
• Thesaurus Master - Taxonomy and thesaurus construction and management
• M.A.I. (Machine Aided Indexer) - Automatic indexing or editorial aid in indexing
• MAIstro™ - Combine Thesaurus Master and M.A.I. for maximum efficiency in both automatic indexing and taxonomy construction
• Additional Knowledge Management Tools - supplement the abilities of these primary products for even greater power in knowledge management.
• Integrates with numerous content management systems, including Microsoft SharePoint
• Exports taxonomy files in XML, OWL, SKOS, and 11 other formats
• Handles taxonomies in virtually all languages
• Uses concept categorization for precise tagging and smarter search

Smart Logic provides an ontology software tool to build and manage complex ontologies. This software package is their Ontology Manager: The tool is designed for anyone with a basic knowledge of taxonomies and information science to develop 'models'. A business analyst can use the tool to assist in the process of building a model. For Information Scientists and Information Architects, the tool conforms to industry standards and has the flexibility and functionality they need to develop complex models.

Some of the Features Include:
- Creates the model of links and structure between language elements that can drive a new user experience
- Holds any term 'metadata' to drive or enhance connected applications.
- Ontology Manager is designed to allow multiple users to create, enhance and browse several types of semantic model which include Lists, Controlled vocabularies, Taxonomies, Thesauri and Ontologies.

If anyone has experience with any of these or other tools I would like to hear more from you!