Finding the Right Recipe for Organizing Enterprise Metadata
Information Management Magazine, December 1, 2008
It’s no secret that the Internet is changing the way we consume and digest information. Every day, consumers who used to reach for the Yellow Pages now reach for Yahoo!, Google and hundreds of other online resources. Information seekers who once cracked open those cherished encyclopedias in the library now surf Wikipedia online.
For years, many enterprises watched this transformation from the sidelines, satisfied to continue adjusting the content management systems in which they had invested.
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But the consumers at home are also our employees at work. And when they arrive at their desks, they bring a new set of expectations that have been shaped by their experiences with the Internet, cell phones, email, mobile handheld computers and iPods. These and other innovations have changed the way people consume and interact with information.
Content and document management is not immune to this transformation. Online sites such as Flickr and del.icio.us allow users to submit their own metadata, known as tags, to shape the architecture of their knowledge and how it’s shared.
These practices known as social tagging are too big and too valuable to the enterprise to be ignored. As information professionals, we can either be intimidated by our fears of anarchy and information chaos, or we can choose to apply these practices to our advantage. In time - perhaps a very short time - we may not have much of a choice. Enterprise users will demand flexible, easy-to-use tagging tools as part of their own pantry of supplies. The only remaining question will be whether or not we are prepared to serve it up.
Consider it an embarrassment of riches: for the contemporary enterprise, progress is not inhibited by a lack of information, but by a lack of easy access to that information. You know the data you need is out there, but where? You believe there’s an expert in your organization who can help, but who? You suspect that there’s a better way to share knowledge, but how?
For many years, enterprises have responded to the information glut by creating taxonomies, structured hierarchies of metadata - or data about data - that organize knowledge in a more orderly, more accessible manner. These systems may be used to classify documents, digital assets and other content within any type of physical or conceptual entity - products, processes, knowledge fields, teams and groups, etc. - at any level of granularity. In its simplest definition, a taxonomy is the standard vocabulary a company uses to describe its business. In practice, taxonomies should make information easier to find.
Folksonomies to the Rescue
Tagging, also known as social bookmarking, social indexing or social classification, allows users to store, organize, search and manage content with metadata they apply using freely chosen keywords. Thomas Vander Wal, the man who coined the word folksonomies for this social approach to metadata, defines it as “collaborative categorization using simple tags.”1
Tagging can facilitate collaboration among specific teams and/or specific projects. As tags are shared, a feedback loop is organically produced between the “taggers” and those consuming the tags. In addition to the actual tag itself, the act of tagging can provide information about the piece of content the tag has been applied to and about the users who have tagged it. On del.icio.us, for example, users can see how many times a piece of content has been tagged - which may denote the relative importance of that reference within the community - as well as who has tagged it (possibly including notes on why it was tagged).
Some enterprise social bookmarking applications have expertise locator profile views that are dynamically generated based on the information collected from the users’ tags, helping the community identify experts on various topics. This kind of triangulated metadata further enables knowledge identification and sharing.
Tagging content can improve the connections between content creators and users, helping them do their jobs more efficiently and intelligently.
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