Taxonomy Inventory and Audit for a Fortune 500 Software Company

Taxonomy Inventory and Audit for a Fortune 500 Software Company

About the Project

Following an Alignment Accelerator workshop, the client, a Fortune 500 publisher of business and finance software, engaged Factor to perform an inventory and audit of metadata and taxonomies that its internal service organization used for content management. This was the first step on the roadmap developed in collaboration with Factor during the Alignment Accelerator and would provide the foundation for future metadata and taxonomy development and management work.

Challenge

The Alignment Accelerator workshop provided several pertinent key findings to guide future efforts, including:

  • There was a general immaturity of the service organization’s content management practices.
  • Metadata and taxonomies, in particular, were largely ad hoc, organically developed, and unmanaged.
  • There was a general lack of governance and integration of both systems and business processes.

The client’s central IT group was tasked with improving access to self-help resources for a number of internal customers, including IT, human resources, finance, global business services, purchasing, and procurement, with the goal of increasing employee productivity. Content metadata and taxonomies clearly needed to be upgraded if this goal was to be met, and the first step to achieving this was to understand the current state. To help develop this understanding we began an inventory and audit of the metadata and taxonomies, including both those specific to the service organization as well as from enterprise platforms.

Factor’s Approach

Taxonomy inventories require an extensive discovery process, with many stones to turn over. A comprehensive approach uses both top-down and bottom-up methods. Here’s how we identified relevant metadata and taxonomies:  

  • Identified metadata and taxonomies used by key platforms, including content management systems, service management and help desk systems, enterprise architecture management, benefits and HR management, enterprise search, and others.
  • Conducted stakeholder interviews and system walkthroughs to identify “hidden” taxonomies.
  • Performed general exploration and research, or “spelunking,” in the client’s environment.

All of this information is collected in a variety of raw forms, typically spreadsheets and CSV files, text files, reports and other documents, and even screenshots. Organizing it, including transforming it into a common format, is an important part of the project and critical for the next step, the analysis. Factor practitioners are experienced with this type of work, collectively having done hundreds of taxonomy inventory projects, and we have developed a taxonomy inventory template that was used in this project.

The final step is the audit (or analysis) of the metadata and taxonomies. Again, this is a task with which Factor has broad and deep experience. We have created an audit template that’s designed to work with the taxonomy inventory. It supports analysis of taxonomies in terms of best practices, suitability for common taxonomy use cases (AI, analytics, auto-categorization, navigation and browsing, and content tagging and indexing), governance, environment and distribution, and regulatory and standards compliance. The audit template also provides visualization and reporting of the audit results. 

What We Learned

The inventory and assessment activity helped us to understand the client’s taxonomy environment, providing important insights and context for future taxonomy enhancements to support content management.

  • 73 individual taxonomies, including both enterprise vocabularies and vocabularies specific to the support organization, were identified, cataloged, and analyzed.
  • These vocabularies included over 8,500 terms and were managed in eight different systems.
  • The taxonomies typically existed as standalone entities in siloed systems, with occasional, usually manual, point-to-point integration.
  • Taxonomy domains only existed in a limited and immature way. Where domains did exist there was a great deal of overlap and duplication at the level of individual terms. For example, nine different taxonomies contained location and geography concepts.
  • Taxonomy governance was minimal, ad hoc, and usually managed by system owners and administrators rather than dedicated taxonomy management resources.

End Result

Factor performed an assessment, including an inventory and multi-factor audit, of the client’s taxonomy landscape to identify opportunities for improved and enhanced content personalization, navigation, and search for employees using the support organization platform.

This assessment helped Factor identify priority areas for improvement that will support a more unified digital experience. We identified taxonomies required to support a new content metadata model and prioritized them for cleanup and consolidation, or creation in cases where the required taxonomy did not exist.

We demonstrated that our taxonomy inventory and audit templates are effective tools for this type of assessment. Using them on this project provided valuable real-world experience that we’ve used to iterate and improve the tools and contributed to making the process standardized and reproducible.

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