InfoCurators’ Blog

InfoCurators first Webinar of the 2007 Fall/Winter series has been published to YouTube.

This Webinar, titled “Make Your Content Discoverable Using Metadata was extremely successful and well received. One participant from Nasa said: “…one of the best Webinars of its kind I have attended.”

Another attendee from the Marine Corps said: “This webinar was very informative and very useful to our staff.”

You can view Part 1 at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pe5_cql7OD8

Stay tuned for the second Webinar in our series coming live in January and later on YouTube!

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=1841&jsessionid

I love the concept of folksonomies. It makes so much sense. When you allow Web visitors to apply meaning to content you them to improve poorly designed Websites by making content more easy to locate. The result could be that large numbers of Websites could become more successful due to folksonomies. Websites would get more visitors. Those visitors could, in turn add value to the folksonomies by pointing to useful content and adding terms, among other activities.

My dream would be to create a third-party interface to Google and all other public search engines that would provide folksonomy-based categorization for Web content, much the way Wikipedia delivers facts. Over time, folksonomies could deliver valuable, relevant content across the globe, fixing the weaknesses in the search engine algorithms that exist today.

“Some leaders feel that by keeping people in the dark, they maintain a measure of control.

But that is a leader’s folly and an organization’s failure.

Secrecy spawns isolation, not success.

Knowledge is power, yes, but what leaders need is collective power, and that requires collective knowledge.”

Captain D. Michael Abrashoff, USN (Retired)
It’s Your Ship: Management Techniques from the Best Damn Ship in the Navy
(p. 55)

A taxonomy is a living entitiy. Once an initial taxonomy has been completed, the next task to complete will be a maintenance plan to keep the taxonomy relevant.

Taxonomies grow and change with an organization. Just as the Website needs to be maintained and updated, so does the taxonomy.

The better the maintenance plan, the easier it will be to maintain and update the taxonomy. A good maintenance plan will differentiate between regular maintenance updates that can be completed as a standard business practice and major structural changes that require levels of approvals and a significant amount of effort.
Different events can be drivers in changes in the taxonomy. Adding or subtracting products and changes in regulatory requirements are examples where maintenance updates are needed. Structural changes become necessary when more significant events occur such as a merger or buying or selling of a company.

The important thing is to recognize that you need a plan. Treat the taxonomy as you would any other valuable resource - it needs a development plan AND a maintenance plan in order to maximize your return on investment.

This is a debate that never goes away. It is about control and it can mean the difference between success and failure for an information system. Is metadata owned by the business or IT? In order to answer that question successfully, you need to come up with a definition metadata.

In most organizations, the systems are owned by the technology group (IT). The information that resides on those systems, financial data; Web content; documents and corporate policies, belong to the business. There is a clear delineation between the system and the information that resides on that system.

What is metadata? Is it content? Is it a part of the system or technology? The problem with metadata is that it falls into a no-man’s land that is neither content or technology. The result is that it usually gets classified as technology and ends up as part of the technology realm.

I would argue, however, that metadata is content. Metadata is information about information. It describes. Without metadata, information can end up with no context and no ownership. While metadata is not core content (for expample this blog posting is the article, but the information about who wrote it is metadata), it is key content.

The technology organization will understand what metadata they will need to make the system perform as specified. The business organization will understand what metadata they will need to make the information on that system more meaningful, easier to retrieve and easier to manage.

I believe metadata is the business of the business. The business should define it and manage it. The business understands its information more than any other group. Implementing metadata on the system is the business of the technology group. How to make the technology deliver metadata effectively can only be accomplished by the technology group.

The first step to getting control of your information is to perform an audit. Companies with thousands, hundreds of thousands and even millions of documents and Web pages need to catalog what they have before using technologies such as content or document management.

Good content and document management practices start with good information. An information audit will expose issues such as ownership, source authority questions, information duplication, metadata inconsistencies and information relevancy and expiration. Armed with good information, an organization can implement content and document management software, search software and taxonomies strategically.

In most cases that we have seen where content/document management, search software or taxonomy projects have struggled, the reasons can be traced to the information to be managed, searched or organized. Without a clear understanding of the state of its information, an organization will be continually challenged in its effort to manage or locate that information.

An information audit will clarify ownership, purpose and function of the organization’s data. A cleansing effort can be put in place prior to spending time and money on introducing new technologies, which will clear the path for a much more successful effort. Doing the information audit after the fact is costly in many ways. First, the project has launched and in most cases, has fallen short of expectations. While this does not have a clear monetary benefit or penalty, the perception of a failure for the project does have a cost to the organization as a whole. A trust in the ability to find needed information is lost and people tend to stop trying.

Performing an information audit will help the project to succeed the first time. In the end, the overall cost and value of that project will be increased and the organization will have a greater trust in their ability to find the knowledge they need.

Metadata is more than a few attributes and descriptions. Metadata can be content and metadata can be used for data transformation and data conversion. In enterprise-wide applications it could be used to initiate procedures, workflows and escalations.

Metadata can be functional. Metadata informs both people and systems. While a piece of metadata such as the title or author will tell a Web visitor what a document or page is about and who wrote it, other metadata will inform a system about how and when to move or archive that piece of information.

Metadata can be used to associate one piece of information to others or to divide information into categories for Web visitors.

Metadata needs to be thought of as a corporate strategic resource. To achieve this however, a very real and very detailed planning process needs to be completed to assure that an organization’s metadata will deliver value.

For that value to be realized, metadata needs to become a central part of an enterprise-level system planning process. Too often, metadata is treated as a poor cousin of technology, when in fact, metadata is becoming a key enabler of technologies.

City planning is an effective paradigm for corporate Web Planning. As an example, New York City is a well designed and easy to navigate city. Manhattan is largely a logical grid design and within that grid, there are districts where specific services can be found. If you want to go to the theater, you go to that district. The financial district is distinct. Fifth and Madison Avenues are great shopping venues. The signage is standardized and the average visitor can get around with minimal instructions.

Can you say the same about your corporate Web? When a new employee starts in your organization, how easy is it for him or her to get oriented and find the services he or she needs? Does your corporate Web require a lot of training to navigate successfully? If so, your company could benefit from using the city planning model for organizing and mapping its corporate Web environment.

I have seen Web sprawl occur in surprising places. It exists in Fortune 1,000 and even Fortune 200 companies. It exists in corporations with the best and latest Web technologies for Web publishing collaboration technology and content and document management systems.

Organizations spend hundreds of thousands on leading-edge technology to control their Web presence internally and externally. The problem is, they will spend very little on the planning and mapping of their Web sites. They will rely on technology and on individual Web developers to build an effective corporate Web community.

Technology is a tool. It is only effective when its use is well planned and architected. Once purchased, most organizations leave it to the IT organization to roll out to a set of authorized users who are tasked with using it according to their corporate standards. IT organizations are very good at implementing and supporting technology. That is generally where their charter ends.

Organizations need to spend more on planning. By avoiding that spending, a lot of their technology purchases are being wasted as employees, business partners and customers are frustrated when they can’t find what they need among the growing sprawl. Their return on investment (ROI) is minimized because of their lack of vision on how important the aspect of the community is to their overall Web presence.

Organizations need to rely more on planners (real live people) to organize and map out their Web communities. Technology can’t plan, but it is a great tool in the hands of a strong human planner.