Taxonomy for an Enterprise

When you visit a shopping malls or a Grocery stores, you will see  all the items  – everything is arranged in aisle, racks, shelves with label, tag (name and description, if some cases), price – product expiry information, nutrition information and etc. It makes a shopper very easy to find what is looking for and where to find it thereby enabling SELF-HELP experience – touch the product and feel it before you actually buy it.

 

Unlike this situation, re-collect your traditional shopping experience - visiting your neighborhood general store, where things are kept up above in shelves, no tags, no labels, no product information, no price details and it’s hard to find what you are looking, with help of store assistance, you need to find your item and if it’s crowded you need to wait in queue for your turn – a lengthy and painful experience – do you agree with this?

What’s the difference between both these scenarios? It’s how things are organized, arranged and made available to the end user. In Enterprise Dictionary, it’s referred as “Taxonomy”. It consists of people, information, data, processes, standards, policies.  All the elements that exist in enterprise need to be classified, categorized, arranged, organized, authorized and made available whenever needed, on DEMAND - very easily.

Taxonomy defines the foundation, structure, governance for enterprise data. Based on the content type and data accessing tool, the layout of Taxonomy is formulated by Software Technical Architects and Designers. It is defined at architecture level and detailed at system design level and implemented and used till end of data life cycle including archives. It’s foundation for Knowledge management systems and enables enterprise search extended to Yahoo and Google.

Taxonomy is not just a design, it’s also an art. When Taxonomy properly adopted and implemented enterprise can look like a Modern Grocery store otherwise it may  be simply termed as neighborhood general store- you may have best branded products, great staff, lot of  discounts, offers  and brand image but it will not take you there……..

Comments

[Philippines Outsourcing]

Corporate taxonomies are increasingly used in information systems (particularly content management and knowledge management systems), as a way to allow instant access to the right information within exponentially growing volumes of data in learning organizations. Relatively simple systems based on semantic networks and taxonomies proved to be a serious competitor to heavy data mining systems and behavior analysis software in contextual filtering applications used for routing customer requests, "pushing" content on a Web site or delivering product advertising in a targeted and pertinent way.