Taxonomies and Folksonomies can be Complimentary
July 25th, 2007by Jeremy Thomas
Sean McClowry, Andreas Rindler and I had a very fruitful session talking about Enterprise 2.0 yesterday. In large part the conversation revolved around recognizing business worthy ideas and turning into robust, corporate-ready assets embraced enterprise wide. I touched on this a couple of months ago when talking about maturing innovation.
Sean has done a great job creating a taxonomy for information management over at openmethodology.org (disclaimer: I’m affiliated with openmethdology through my company) and we focused mainly on how to harness assets “organically conceived” in the Enterprise 2.0 cloud by mapping them to our taxonomy of mature intellectual property without losing the crowd’s perspective on said assets.
We came up with a scheme whereby ideas in the Enterprise 2.0 ecosystem can be socially bookmarked and tagged, much as one would do on delicious. But in this scheme the user is also presented with the enterprise taxonomy, along with “tooltips” (thanks Andreas for that term) to explain the taxonomy to the user. The user then selects the category from the taxonomy to classify the idea with other corporate assets.
What’s beautiful about this system is that we get two perspectives on ideas/information:
- A corporate view based on a pre-conceived taxonomy. This groups an “immature” Enterprise 2.0 asset with a “mature” corporate knowledge asset and prepares the former for corporate assimilation at the identified level in the taxonomy. Or, if an Editor so chooses, he may associate the asset with a different category.
- The user’s perspective of the asset (a.k.a his tags) is not lost. So for every Enterprise 2.0-generated idea that is matured into the taxonomy we maintain the “crowd’s perspective”. This means categories (corporate view) in the corporate taxonomy will also be related to tags (user’s view).
This is an area that is often neglected when we talk about Enterprise 2.0. The process of maturing ideas often means integrating social computing (E2.0), with more controlled content management systems requiring mediation before ideas are recognized as corporate strategy, policy etc. I think it’s here that the old world meets the new.
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July 25th, 2007 at 6:21 pm
With this E2.0 Taxonomy have you thought about its impact on the relationships within the company? i.e. a large part of the X/Y generation are always looking for avenues to advance, with your ideas, they have an open forum for innovation and recognition. This could be both good and bad. In a lot of organizations, particularly legacy companies ( E1.0 ) like banks, there is a different dynamic and a greater sense of needing to “earn your stripes”. With this in mind, there might be greater resistance to this kind of fundamental shift in organizational structure/behavior. I would be interested to see what angle you would take in approaching these old style companies, as generally they are the ones who stand to benefit the most from these new ideas/taxonomies.
July 25th, 2007 at 7:29 pm
Hey Peter - I agree with what you’re saying. There is no doubt significant cultural change required for companies to embrace ideas from those who haven’t “earned their stripes” per se.
What’s interesting is, in my work life, I’ve found banks to be surprisingly receptive to E2.0 ideas. What we’re trying to do is show how, for these traditional organizations, E2.0 augments the investment they’ve made in “old school” information management strategies, policies and systems.
September 10th, 2007 at 3:01 am
[…] Therefore, the approach may involve the use of categories and taxonomies to bring together collaborative forms of communications and link it to the formal network. Both Andi Rindler and Jeremy Thomas have discussed some work we are doing in their area on the MIKE2.0 project on their blog posts. We’re also starting to see the implementation of some very cool ideas for dynamically bringing together tagging concepts such as the Tagline Generator. […]