How to Design & Implement an Enterprise Content Taxonomy (Video)

Intel enterprise taxonomy strategist Melinda Geist and Factor principal Bram Wessel discuss how to integrate search into your enterprise information ecosystem in this clip from their presentation at Enterprise Search & Discovery 2018.

Intel created an enterprise information model to describe and define its core information assets.

“Designing and implementing our enterprise content taxonomy made it obvious that, in order to address the problems that we had with content findability on Intel.com, we were going have to pay particular attention to enterprise search. And the goal was to make sure the assets that we have invested in—in both the enterprise marketing taxonomy and the enterprise content taxonomy—gave our search application the best chance of success,” noted Geist.

“The way to build a successful enterprise taxonomy—and, at Factor, that’s what we do—is you have to consider the information behavior and information needs of all of your users—whether those are external customers or whether they're internal users or staff,” added Wessel. “That way, no matter what capability you apply to it, you'll have the meaning embedded into that core taxonomy itself. Once we got to search, here are some of the decisions we needed to make and here’s how the enterprise taxonomies we created helped us make those decisions and make integration and onboarding easier.” 

According to Wessel, “First, we asked ourselves, ‘What is our information supply chain? Is it a game of telephone like this, or is it more coherent and rationalized?’ Data quality has downstream effects. When you start with good, clean values at the beginning, it leads to better results downstream. When you build an enterprise taxonomy based on user research, it truly reflects user mental models. When your taxonomy reflects user mental models and they are adapted to search, the search experience is much more likely to be meaningful.” 

Wessel continued, “Meaning matters. From a content perspective, your system of meaning helps users find and orient themselves within the concepts expressed in your content. If product information is your challenge, it improves users’ ability to find the right products—and as everybody knows, customers can't buy products that they can't find.”

View the video

Many speakers have made their slide decks available at www.enterprisesearchanddiscovery.com/2018/Presentations.aspx.

Learn more at Enterprise Search & Discovery 2019, coming to Washington, DC, Nov. 5-7.