Governing the Information Architecture

The enterprise is ever changing, and the information architecture (i.e., content model, taxonomy and metadata) should and will evolve. This evolution may include developing new content types, expanding/collapsing the taxonomy and modifying the metadata, as well as relationships between content types and its associated business rules. This effects all of your applications (including customer facing websites and intranet sites) and a plan to manage and govern its use must be put in place.

By managing the Information Architecture you can promote the consistency of the information used across all organizational areas, teams and systems. The content model facilitates consistency in storing, retrieving, and presenting content while improving the search (“findability”) of content. By managing enterprise content (information and knowledge), its metadata, and associated taxonomy, the customers (internal and external) that use these various applications will find the content they are looking for when and how they need it.

The following gives some brief information on managing the Content Model, Taxonomy and Metadata Schema:

Content Model - The Content Model (CM) represents the graphical “road map” of content in support of the customer along with their associated relationships. The intent is that all software systems using content across the enterprise will align with the CM. Situations will arise where changes to the model will be needed, certain business activities may in fact necessitate a change to the model. Managing the changes and understanding the impacts downstream (taxonomy, metadata, and systems) must be coordinated and acted upon.

Taxonomy - Taxonomies evolve as the business grows, extend as additional technology-related functions are incorporated, and morph as the business model changes. Once implemented, it is imperative to conduct frequent and consistent pulse checks with the business to continually gauge the taxonomy’s fit and relevance. Armed with this information, the appropriate governance measures can be taken to adapt the taxonomy to meet evolving requirements.

Metadata - The metadata schema governance represents the business discipline for managing the metadata about the content of the organization. The intent is that all software systems using content across the enterprise will incorporate the recommended metadata associated to the content. Metadata governance will ensure consistency of name and meaning of metadata fields and its associated values (i.e., reconcile the difference in terminology such as "clients" and "customers," "revenue" and "sales," etc.). Metadata governance will also ensure clarity of relationships, by resolving ambiguity and inconsistencies when determining the associations between entities stored throughout content environment. For example, if a customer declares a "beneficiary" in one application, and this beneficiary is called a "participant" in another application, metadata definitions would help clarify the situation.

So, the question is are you managing/governing your Information Architecture? If not, why? I am very interested in hearing your thoughts on this subject!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Leveraging Faceted Search

In my upcoming publication Knowledge Management in Practice I detail search in a chapter called "Dude Where's my Car: Utilizing Search in KM". At the KM World Taxonomy Boot Camp I spoke about Utilizing Ontologies for Taxonomy & Content Organization and during this discussion there were questions concerning faceted search. Before the year ends (literally) I wanted to provide some details concerning faceted search:

Faceted search offers remarkable potential for putting the search experience in the hands of the user. It provides a flexible framework by which users can satisfy a wide variety of information needs, ranging from simple look up and fact retrieval to complex exploratory search and discovery scenarios.

With faceting, search results are grouped under useful headings, using tags you apply ahead of time to the documents in your index. For example, the results of a shopping query for books might be grouped according to the type of book and the price.

Each time the user clicks a facet value, the set of results is reduced to only the items that have that value. Additional clicks continue to narrow down the search—the previous facet values are remembered and applied again.

Faceted search results provide an easy-to-scan, browse and display that helps users quickly narrow down each search. The faceting tags that you store with your documents provide a way to add your own taxonomy to directly control the presentation of search results. In the end, it's about helping the user find the right information. Faceted search gives a user the power to create an individualized navigation path, drilling down through successive refinements to reach the right document. This more effectively mirrors the intuitive thought patterns of most users. Faceted search has become an expected feature, particularly for commerce sites.

However, before you get too deep into the intricacies of faceted search, it is extremely important that you develop use cases or user stories around your search scenarios mentioned earlier. A great way to get started is to identify the main concepts you would like to search (People, reports, policies, etc.); next create logical categories (start by building or leveraging a taxonomy) for each group (Engineers, Executives, Administrators, etc.) a card sort exercise will be helpful here, and finally create (or use a current) information/content model showing relationships and considering navigation paths.

This will put you on a path to realizing the benefits of faceted search!

The Role of the Information Architect

The Role of the Information Architect

Often when I am working with organizations to implement a Knowledge Management (KM) Solution the role of the business and more specifically the users of the application are discussed. The users of the proposed KM application will determine its worth to the organization. If the system is not used and/or is poorly received the organization would have wasted time and valuable resources in developing the KM solution. When this occurs KM in many instances receives a negative view in the minds of the people at the organization and this leads to the abandonment of KM entirely. To prevent this unseemly situation and to get your organization started in the right direction I would recommend bringing in an Information Architect. In this role the information Architect will be the catalyst to bring the users together, along with specific business objectives to enable the KM solution to be adopted by the users and embraced by the organization.

One thing you may be asking is “How does the Information Architect accomplish this?” The information Architect Instead of focusing on typical IT problems, comes to the project with a threefold focus: Users of the Information, the Information Itself and the Business/Organization. With this focus the Information Architect will perform the following tasks:

·       Gather Requirements pertaining to the content and structure of the KM solution (SME’s and Users are heavily involved here)

·        Construct the Information Model (SME’s and Users are heavily involved here to further define and validate Content)

·        Instantiate Business Rules (depicted as relationships) onto the model (SME’s and Users are heavily involved here to further define and validate Content Relationships)

·        Develop the Taxonomy (categorizations of content (information & knowledge) for the KM Solution

o   SME’s and Users are heavily involved here

o   Card Sort exercise is often used to solidify the Content Categories and Taxonomy

·         Develops the Metadata Schema (specific information about the content)

·         Develops Standards for Content Assembly

·         Contributes to the development of the Style Guide for Content Delivery

·         Contributes to creating an authoring Environment that would leverage the Standards and Style Guide for Content

When developing your KM solution having an Information Architect (or team of Information Architects) will ensure user and business involvement as well as the adoption and use of the KM solution. This is a step in the right direction to contribute to KM being viewed as a positive influence and having value within the culture of your organization.

If your organization is considering developing or enhancing a KM Solution and are using or considering using an Information Architect I would like to especially hear from you!

Are You Maintaining Your Taxonomy?

Once you have deployed your Knowledge Portal or Knowledge Management (KM) System’s taxonomy, controlled vocabulary, information architecture, achieved initial search engine optimization (SEO), and deployed to your users, you're done! Hold on... You're not done yet! As a matter of fact you have just begun! Now you must execute your strategy on how you will maintain the knowledge portal's taxonomy and its underlining taxonomy infrastructure.

In your Knowledge Management Strategy, indicating how your organization will maintain the underlining taxonomy infrastructure, which involves the requirements, and tools, will be essential to the ongoing success of the Knowledge Portal (KM System). When you think of what requirements are needed consider the following:

• How easily and can categories added, edited, or deleted?
• How easily and can relationship types and relationships between your knowledge and its     associated content be defined, edited, or deleted?
•  Does a change propagate to all instances?
•  What users and their permissions need to be established on an ongoing basis?
•  Determine what assignment or modification of privileges to one or a group of items is needed?
•  Taxonomy Governance requirements (approval, new, change, etc. workflows that maybe needed or modified)
•  Metadata/Controlled Vocabulary requirements (assign attributes to a category, associate controlled vocabulary with metadata field, and thesaurus capabilities)

In determining what tools you should utilize to assist in managing your taxonomy infrastructure consider the following:

• Tools that have Taxonomy Development capabilities, which include establishing user roles and permissions
• Tools that have Taxonomy Maintenance capabilities, which include adding, editing, moving, and deleting items
• Tools that have the ability to assign or modify privileges to one or a group of items
• Tools that have Taxonomy Governance, which lends itself to the development and maintenance of workflows for knowledge content
• Tools that have Metadata Controlled Vocabulary, which includes assigning attributes to a category and associating controlled vocabulary with metadata fields as well as Thesaurus capabilities
• Tools that have custom reporting capabilities
• Tools that have application integration APIs (WSDL, Scripts, etc.)

Below is a table containing some of the most widely used taxonomy/controlled vocabulary tools in currently use. I would encourage you to contact these vendors and also refer to the latest Gartner, and Forrester analysis before you decide to bring a vendor in for further discussion.

TAXONOMY TOOLS

Vendor	Taxonomy Tool	URL
Apelon	Apelon Distributed Terminology System (DTS)	http://www.apelon.com/Products/DTS/tabid/97/Default.aspx
Synaptica	Synaptica	http://www.synapticasoftware.com/
SAS	SAS Ontology Management	http://www.sas.com/text-analytics/ontology-management/index.html
SmartLogic	Semaphore Ontology Manager	http://www.smartlogic.com/home/products/semaphore-modules/ontology-manager/ontology-manager-overview
WorldMap	WordMap Designer	http://www.wordmap.com/
protege	protege	http://protege.stanford.edu/
Mondeca	Intelligent Topic Manager	http://www.mondeca.com/Products/ITM
idera	SharePoint Information Architect	http://www.idera.com/SharePoint/sharepoint-information-architect/

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!

Selecting The Enterprise Search Engine

The final post in this series puts all the parts together that we have been talking about and incorporating a viable enterprise search engine that will satisfy our needs. Depending on your platform of choice and your search needs there are several search engines to select from. To get a jump start on determining what search engine works for you I have included information from New Idea Technologies on Enterprise Search Engines by Mark Bennett.

In his article Mark Bennett presents a summary of the core features and functionality that many enterprise search engine customers are concerned with (see diagram on the left). To summarize his findings Bennett points out that the majority of customers want the capability of the search engine to crawl large numbers of documents, enable secure content features, provide search analytics and content promotion, enable metadata & tagging, the ability to search (crawl) multiple repositories, while also providing faceted and taxonomy based searching.

In addition Bennett identifies the various vendors that are prominent in the search engine space and how they stack up against each other (see diagram on the right). You have your usual suspects such as Microsoft and Google, but he also mentions other vendors such as Lookout Software and IBM along with Oracle who are becoming more involved in the search market. The bottom line is determining what are your specific search requirements, identifying the vendors that meet those requirements and letting them show you (not just tell you!) how they will meet your needs.

I would like to know what your experience has been in identifying and selecting an enterprise search solution and vendor. I look forward to your comments,

What About the Content? Crafting the Content Migration Strategy

In this continuing series about finding pertinent content on our knowledge repositories we must not forget about how we are going to get the content on to the knowledge repository. Having a clear, concise and workable plan for content migration is a critical ingrediant in our ability to later find "knowledge nuggets" that will help us in performing our tasks. The following steps outline best practices that should be considered when developing your content migration strategy:

1. Content Identification – Each business area involved in the content migration to the new/existing knowledge repository must perform a knowledge audit, developing an inventory of what the area has and how it relates to the users. This is the most time consuming task in the effort.

2. Content Analysis – Once existing content has been inventoried the analysis of this content can begin. This analysis will determine what content is to be moved, re-purposed, archived, or deleted. At this stage content can be properly tagged with appropriate terms/keywords. In addition during this step discovery of knowledge gaps will occur and must be documented.

3. Stakeholder/Management Engagement – In managing this effort it is essential that stakeholders understand the effort, it is properly scheduled, staffed and expectations managed.

4. Knowledge Repository Design – Before content migration begins the Knowledge Repository design must be completed with all associated components including look-and-feel and navigation of the environment.

5. Taxonomy, Content Types and Metadata Mapping – Content mapping activities provide the opportunity to understand how content will be placed into the taxonomy of the Knowledge Repository.

6. Training – In order for the appropriate staff to start migrating content on to the Knowledge Repository they must be trained on how the system works and the steps necessary to “on board” content on to the environment.

7. Content Migration – Now it is time to populate the Knowledge Repository with content. In order to successfully perform this task specific steps communicated in training must be executed.

For additional information on crafting your Content Management Strategy check out the resources below and I look forward to comments and discussion!

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!

Dude where's my car? Using Taxonomies and Ontologies in Search

Have you ever experienced a situation when you just could not find that document on your content management system you were looking for? You may have known part of the title or what some of the contents were but you couldn't put your finger on it. You executed the latest search mechanisms on the site and you had to weed through several pages of content searching for that elusive piece of information. Then finally after a period of time (who knows how long) you either find it (OH Yea!) or give up in frustration (@%#&#^#).

A possible cure for your dilemma as well as mine and countless others is to implement a taxonomy and/or ontology into the information architecture of your intranet, SharePoint, or other orgainizational content management/knowledge repository. You now may be asking yourself, what in the world is a taxonomy? or ontology?

Simply put a taxonomy is a hierarchical classification or framework for information retrieval. ontology is a classification/specification of concepts (see more on ontology). For you SharePoint users out here leveraging Content Types and Metadata along with a solid taxonomy will greatly enhance your search to return what you are looking for. While leveraging an ontology will provide another level of search accuracy leveraging concepts or conceptual searching. Taxonomies are the basis of classfication schemes and indexing systems in information management (see more on taxonomy).

There are many tools and possible solutions available to solve our serach dilemma. Therefore, over the next few weeks I will be looking into the various solutions and finding out what folks are doing to address our search dilemma. So, once and for all we can answer the question: Dude Wher's My Car?