You Don’t Need to Complicate Your Taxonomy. We’ll Help You Simplify It.
Posted by TallyFox on 22 November 2016
Information environments have grown more complex and users expectations have increased. They are no longer happy with their enterprise search software offering results they haven't asked for and leaving out the ones that are relevant.
Search algorithms, regardless of how sophisticated and intelligent they are will never replace the need for a level of structured tagging, i.e. taxonomy.
Autotagging algorithms, if designed to operate without context, are very complex and often not available in many knowledge sharing solutions.
The best course of action is to simplify the taxonomy by organising it based on members’ expertise, using terms that are familiar to the organization already.
So how do you do that?
Let us guide you through the issues.
The biggest issue with the Emerge approach is inconsistency.
When you let each member decide how they want to tag their content, guided by their own logic, very quickly the keyword "tag cloud" becomes cluttered with similar or irrelevant terms that do not match the standard terminology of the company. This leads to members trying to figure out what sort of keywords are the most relevant to what they are searching for, and to try many of them before they get the result they are looking for, if they get it at all. This leads to increased frustration and lack of engagement.
On the other hand, The Bootcamp approach has proven to be inefficient because the taxonomy terms created by high-level managers often overlooked or missed key areas of work, or created an excessive amount of terms that were never used and only caused confusion. Any adjustments were a long and drawn-out ordeal.
How can we help you simplify your taxonomy?
In our extensive research, we discovered that the key to the problem KM tools are facing is to base taxonomy on expertise defined by the members and created in collaboration with Community Managers.
Together with them, we use existing keywords and taxonomies to turn them into simple expertise taxonomies, while also allowing members to contribute by defining their expertise.
In this way, the members using the KM platform are confident that any term they use from the taxonomy has at least one relevant expert. This increases their confidence in using the Q&A, project groups, or just browsing to see where company expertise lies.
Plus, our support team takes care of uploading your taxonomy, so all you need is to start tagging.
It's that easy.
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