|
|
 |
|
|
|
Unlocking Knowledge Assets
|
|
|
Author
|
|
Susan Conway and Char Sligar
|
|
|
Pages
|
256
|
|
Disk
|
N/A
|
|
Level
|
All Levels
|
|
Published
|
02/27/2002
|
|
ISBN
|
9780735614635
|
|
Price
|
$39.99
To see this book's discounted price, select a reseller below.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Chapter 6: Building Taxonomies continued
How Taxonomies Play a Role in Content
Taxonomies are not static documents that are locked away for safekeeping. They adapt and change, just as they influence content and knowledge workers to adapt and change. In an ideal KM solution, taxonomies are interactive.
What content is created and acquired is based on the information that an organization's knowledge workers (such as its employees or customers) need. You create the taxonomy according to the content. The way knowledge workers look for information also influences the taxonomy. Values, or terms, from the taxonomy are applied to content. Values from the taxonomy are applied to knowledge worker data (such as in Active Directory service or in an employee database) so that content and expertise can be found and delivered to knowledge workers. The following sections describe these interactions more fully.
Information Needs Drive Content
A company's collection of information is dynamic, often created and managed through multiple channels and systems, and it reflects the priorities and needs of the employees, managers, and customers. The needs of the knowledge workers drive the expansion of the body of corporate information. For example, when Microsoft decided to enter the video gaming console market with Xbox, its corporate information needs grew to include competitive analyses, sales forecasting, and technology areas in the gaming market.
To identify your organization's information needs, you should first do a needs assessment. This analysis is similar to the organizational needs analysis suggested in Chapter 3, "Knowledge and the Business Culture," but in this case you focus on the areas of information needed to run your business. Search query logs, analysis of library reference requests, focus group results, findings from in-person interviews of individual knowledge workers, and survey results are all indicators of what content each segment of employees needs, and on what schedule. These sources also tell you about the knowledge workers' information-seeking behavior, which in turn lets you know which access methods (such as searching and browsing) and access points (such as metadata elements) you need to use in schemas and in descriptive and navigational taxonomies.
Content Informs the Taxonomy
Which concepts and terms that an enterprise should manage in a corporate taxonomy are determined by the enterprise's business needs. The aim is not to manage all terms but to identify which subset of terms should be included and managed. The needs analysis method described above determines what content needs to be created or acquired, and this same process—and the content that results—provides the scope for the taxonomy management process. This helps to determine the taxonomy's scope.
Once you know the taxonomy's scope, you can harvest new terms and concepts from existing and emerging content. The goal of this step is twofold:
- To keep the concepts in a corporate taxonomy current and synchronized with the evolving flow of created and published content
- To see that the associated terms reflect the language that the content authors use
Information-Seeking Behavior Influences Taxonomy
The differences between a navigational taxonomy and a descriptive taxonomy have already been described. When you match the taxonomy to knowledge workers' information-seeking behavior, consider the needs of navigational browsing behavior as well as searching behavior. For searching to truly support information discovery, general exploratory searches need to be as successful as the more focused known item searches, matching the entire corporate body of knowledge, the knowledge worker, and the types of information being sought.
Similarly, one of the aims of KM is not only to connect knowledge workers with knowledge and an organization's knowledge assets but also to help inform the knowledge worker in situations where appropriate content is not available. A KM system should not only inform the user that his or her search failed but also provide a way to give feedback to the taxonomy administrators. User feedback about failed searches informs the taxonomy administrators of the users' search selection. Taxonomy research will be needed to determine if changes to the structure or taxonomy will be needed in the future to avoid failed searches. The corporate taxonomy should include the language that is employed by the knowledge worker to describe concepts, whether or not content covers these concepts. In this manner, a KM system can not only inform the knowledge worker of the existence of content but also can begin to inform the knowledge worker, and the content owners, of the lack of content.
Taxonomy Values Are Applied to Content
Once you have a taxonomy, you can start using it to describe and categorize your organization's content. Using a taxonomy in this way supports searching, browsing, and content management. In most situations you can directly apply the terms from taxonomies to content by using metadata tags or by adding properties to the content files. An example of direct application is the use of the <META> tag from the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) 4.01 specification placed directly into HTML content:
<META name="keywords" content="knowledge management, information discovery, taxonomies">
You can also apply metadata indirectly by storing the values separate from the content with a pointer to the content. Content registries, metadata registries, and library catalogs are examples of this type of indirect application. In both methods, content is segmented, collocated, classified, managed for timeliness, or distributed according to reliable, consistent metadata selected from a common taxonomic source.
Document management systems (such as Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server) can also provide a way to store metadata about the content—and the content itself—within the same system. In these systems, the metadata and the content are distinct and separate, but the system can intelligently index them as a single virtual document to improve retrieval through searching.
Taxonomy Values Are Applied to Knowledge Workers
A taxonomy can also be useful when it comes to information about your employees. You can use even very basic directory-level information (such as an employee's job title or work group) to dynamically display personalized information through a Web portal, team site, collaborative community, or other business application. For example, either a technical white paper or a high-level product overview could be highlighted in search results depending on a searcher's job.
You can also capture and make use of an even deeper level of knowledge worker information to provide richer features and business intelligence over the long term. For example, in a community of practice (CoP), by having a more robust profile of each participant (gathered either through implicit data mining or through explicit knowledge worker-supplied data and stored in a directory or user-profile database), a business application can provide the community participants with better information about the source and quality of the knowledge that is being presented. When a community member comes upon some information posted by a community expert, for example, he or she could find out how many solutions (in contrast to questions) that the expert has provided, the reuse rate for his or her contributions, how long he or she has been a member of that community, and what other communities he or she belongs to. In a larger context, this information can help people identify individuals with expertise in various areas across communities.
Similarly, you can capture and consolidate a knowledge worker's searching behavior (such as the order in which he or she generally requests information) and other implicit knowledge (such a current job or project) as part of that knowledge worker's profile. The exact terms that a knowledge worker enters in a search, for example, can be helpful in building a taxonomy. Then you can tag the knowledge worker with metadata to identify that person to other system users, or "push" (send information) to him or her based on what the system believes the person will want to see.
Content Is Found and Delivered to Knowledge Workers
Taxonomies can improve search engine recall in cases where queries are manipulated. For example, when a knowledge worker types a common misspelling, the taxonomy can modify the query to use the correct or authorized spelling. Taxonomies can also improve search engine precision in cases where tagging supports content registries of high-value selected content. For example, Microsoft's Knowledge Network Group maintains a registry database of "Best Bets" (with regard to search results—not the quality of the content as discussed later in Chapter 7) that represent the best information sources for a select set of common user queries. When a knowledge worker enters a general query that returns several hundred hits (a Microsoft product name, for example), the best answers for the worker's questions will appear as Best Bets at the top of the results list. Both of these enhancements save time for knowledge workers. In addition, they aid in finding the right information and, in the case of the content registry, they help to push authoritative, consistent information to the top.
A navigational taxonomy in particular brings special benefits to knowledge workers. The exposed structure of a navigational taxonomy provides employees with visual cues about an information domain's scope, as demonstrated in Figure 6-1. It gives quick access to often-used information, and it shows a sequence of steps or gives a priority order to complex information.
Click to view graphic
Figure 6-1. Navigational Taxonomy
Identifying Experts in the Organization
As your base of information about your employees grows, your ability to identify the expertise of the people in your enterprise will also grow. When you have information about an individual's browsing, searching, and posting habits; metadata from the content that he or she has created; the projects that he or she has worked on; community involvement; and preferences and patterns in the data he or she accesses in the corporate intranet, your portal or KM system can manage and describe the knowledge worker's experience base in the same way it shows the contents of the repository.
Capturing such information within the organization may be less controversial than doing it in an external Internet environment. But the corporate culture will likely influence or constrain the reaction to (and acceptance of) gathering, mining, manipulating, storing, and making use of what may be regarded as "my personal" information. Nevertheless, this approach can be one of the best ways of connecting employees with other employees and for the corporation to begin to learn more about the implicit knowledge that its employees have.
Previous
| Table of Contents
|
Next
Last Updated: February 5, 2002
|
