Zen and the art of taxonomy maintenance; Part II: The primary questions of purpose

A masterclass covering the creation, implementation and maintenance of taxonomies in a corporate context. By Jan Wyllie

More and more people see it, or get a glimpse of it in bad moments, a ghost which calls itself rationality... This is the ghost of normal everyday assumptions which declares that the ultimate purpose of life, which is to keep alive, is impossible, but that this is the ultimate purpose of life anyway, so that great minds struggle to cure diseases so that people may live longer, but only madmen ask why. One lives longer in order that he may live longer. There is no other purpose. That is what the ghost says.
Pirsig, R.M., Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974)

The whys and what fors

Last month, we addressed some of the philosophical questions about what taxonomies are and how they fit into information architectures. It was argued that, because taxonomies are primarily social constructions that people use as intellectual tools in the interpretation of meaning, questions need to be considered about what the many different types of automated software solutions were actually doing to people’s thinking processes.

Now the questions are: what are taxonomies for? Whose interests do they serve? The reason it is so important to ask these questions at the start is that taxonomies have the potential to shape thinking. They provide maps to help people to understand and traverse the knowledge space. It is true that the map is not the territory per se, but it does have a very strong influence on how people conceive that territory. And despite their power to shape knowledge, the design, implementation and maintenance of taxonomies do not require too much introspection on the meaning of life, the universe and everything. They are merely mental artefacts that assist in the processes of interpretation and understanding; lenses enabling people to see otherwise hidden perspectives.

How interests create perspectives

For most businesses, profit and survival are the primary purposes. Therefore, the first task for this kind of organisation is to develop the dreaded business case, which illustrates how a taxonomy will improve the bottom line, ideally by increasing both productivity and sales.

While the what’s-it-do-for-the-bottom-line question is easy enough to pose, it’s a lot harder to answer, especially as success must invariably be translated into hard figures: the so-called tangibles. The most difficult part of this conundrum is working out the exact causal relationships between the elements being measured. For example, selling more cars means success and profit for car manufacturers, but a net loss of polluting our life-sustaining environment. How can such different perspectives be reconciled on the same balance sheet?

Success and purpose are dependent on perspective and what people perceive to be their interests. The higher the perspective achieved (ie, the more elements considered and the more values combined meaningfully), the more tragically self-defeating lower-level conflicts of interests – profits versus environment, for example – seem.

The value of the bigger picture

Organisations that are purely driven by profit may put themselves at a serious disadvantage. For example, using automated taxonomies to reduce staff numbers rather than to enrich people’s work experience could have a negative impact on both customers and employee morale.

At the initial stage of any project, it is prudent to consider the bigger picture. Although in today’s world it is necessary to start with a business case, it would also be wise to enquire as to the case for an initiative (in this case, a taxonomy) in the workplace, the community and even the environment. Taxonomies can indeed be used to reduce environmental impacts, by significantly cutting the need for travel and face-to-face meetings.

Types of application

However, before working out specific cases for taxonomies, it is necessary to understand some of the principal purposes for which taxonomies can be used.

Information retrieval

The purpose of traditional taxonomies such as the Dewey Decimal system is to help people to find books, by subject, title and author. Libraries and bookshops have been using classification systems to tag and find books and articles since ancient times. A major problem, though, was that if an item was misclassified, it could be lost for years. Librarians used to have a very heavy responsibility in keeping knowledge accessible, receiving not nearly as much recognition as they deserved.

In the late 1960s, text-retrieval software began to alter centuries’ of library tradition. All of a sudden, it became possible to retrieve text-based information in seconds, rather than hours or days, using an automatically generated index of every word in every document.

Librarians and their taxonomies lost their monopoly on information retrieval. Investment was poured into inventing ways to retrieve information from huge document collections without having to use taxonomies. Information-science professionals developed clever search algebra, while software engineers developed natural-language processing, enabling people to query collections in their own words without the need to exercise the intellectual effort involved in using Boolean algebra based on functions like AND, OR and NOT.

One of the fruits of this labour is software that returns ‘relevancy rankings’ with the results of search queries. At this point, the user must ask not whether the results were relevant to their search terms, however expressed, but whether they were pertinent to the question they had in mind. As users know to their cost, many items can be relevant but not pertinent (although all pertinent items must be relevant). The other problem with this kind of free-text-based searching is that there is no way of telling what pertinent information the software has missed because, unlike a librarian, it cannot fully understand the user’s purpose.

Such problems have fostered a growing revival of the use of taxonomies as information-retrieval tools. A good taxonomy will give users the clues they need to navigate their own way to what is pertinent to their question. They may have to think a bit, and choose alternatives, but that experience has the advantage of helping them orient their question in the wider information space by providing meaningful context, compared with the computer-controlled shot-in-the-dark approach of software-driven query/retrieval systems.

In this case, the taxonomy becomes a tool that can be controlled by those retrieving the information, according to their own understanding of their purposes, rather than a mysterious black box that returns information according to competing products using mathematical calculations, algorithms and/or semantic theories, all of which claim to be the best methodology on the market.

Perhaps predictably, if improving information retrieval is the purpose of the exercise, the best thing is to do both: use taxonomies for organising and finding items according to a more abstract and conceptual structure, and use full-text retrieval systems to access proper nouns, jargon and specific terms and phrases.

Collaboration

Most people use agendas in meetings, whether they are running a global corporation, a government or a local sailing club. Without an agreed agenda of some sort, people would want to talk about different things at the same time, and there would be no agreed purpose to the meeting. Misunderstandings would be rampant, tempers would flare. The people with the loudest voices, as opposed to the most appropriate knowledge, would likely prevail.

Agendas are simple taxonomies used as tools for the purpose of collaboration. Meetings are rarely longer than two hours, however, and the ratio of important knowledge and good decisions to noise often tends to be depressingly low. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that a good agenda adds a lot of value to a meeting.

Unfortunately, in the virtual world of e-mail and document sharing, taxonomies are seldom used as tools to improve collaboration. Once again, the ‘magic’ of a computer’s ability to sort alphabetically and numerically, and instantly locate data has masked the real human problems involved with knowledge collaboration at a distance.

A great advantage that people have when meeting physically is the direct experience of social clues, such as facial expression and body language, as well as the ability to instantly answer queries and address any confusion. Over the telephone, the tone of voice and the instant-feedback loop keep one-to-one conversations on track. In the virtual world, these kinds of natural cues are not available – ‘smilies’ do not even begin to fit the bill. That is why in an era of cheap and instant telecommunications, and despite all the hundreds and thousands of collaborative software tools and powerful search engines that are available, the managerial class still flies, drives and rides countless millions of miles every year to have information-poor, often personality-dominated face-to-face meetings.

The real problem with virtual collaboration is that people have not learnt to compensate for the lack of physical contact by making use of the advantages of working with taxonomies as extended agendas into the domains of e-mail, computer conferencing and multimedia conferencing. Just as using a simple agenda makes a face-to-face meeting so much more productive, the use of an agreed taxonomy will make a virtual workgroup of any kind much more productive as well.

The discipline involved in using taxonomies as collaboration tools among remote working groups gives practitioners considerable advantages over the traditional way of working with mail/e-mail, telephone and physical meetings. They can choose to organise their work synchronously (everyone ‘attends’ at the same time), as in video-conferencing, chat-rooms and telephone conferencing, or asynchronously (people participate at a time convenient to them), as in computer conferencing. Without the difficulties involved in arranging travel schedules, collaboration can be continuous and ongoing, rather than sporadic and intermittent. Without the time constraints, the organising taxonomy can be much richer and more detailed than an agenda for a two-hour physical meeting. This increase in the quality of work comes in addition to the savings in time and transport costs.

As growing security concerns and increasing travel expenses make traditional, face-to-face collaboration less attractive and economical, the chances are increasing that remote collaborative working will become a more strategic focus for both business and government.

One of the key aspects of meaningful collaboration is that it is essentially a human activity. A taxonomy with the purpose of improving remote collaboration will be quite different from a taxonomy with the purpose of retrieving pertinent information about, say, the price of eggs. Having a common purpose and a thorough understanding of the attitudes, motivations and time constraints of all the collaborators is a good place to start the process.

Intelligence

The third major purpose for using a taxonomy is as a tool for refining intelligence from a body of knowledge. Intelligence is information that knowledge users need to know, whether or not they know enough to ask or search for it. The purpose of intelligence taxonomies is to organise information flows according to the key questions that will yield the most predictive and valuable knowledge.

Another problem with the search-and-retrieval mode of interacting with information is that it assumes that the goal is to enable everyone to ask their own question, preferably in their own words. Instead of being able to target a source base with a whole taxonomy of questions at once, individuals only get one shot in the dark at a time, and usually without the benefit of much expertise on how to pose the best questions (a key art that has been virtually ignored in the information and knowledge-management fields).

A significant part of this (almost) lost art of posing intelligent questions is ‘chunking’ – bundling up many similar specific questions into a few conceptual questions (see sidebar – Example of an intelligence taxonomy). Successful intelligence taxonomies help users to see the bigger picture first. Details are not ignored, but rather classified, allowing them to be used as indicators, as well as a concentrated source of key facts and quotes. Items that do not fit the classification system are often indicators of new questions and issues not yet dealt with in the intelligence taxonomy.

Intelligence agencies and academics pioneered this kind of intelligence service based on a methodology called content analysis in the 1930s and 1940s when it was crucial to the success of war effort. However, during the 1960s and 1970s, these agencies were seduced by software technologies that purported to dramatically reduce the need for this kind of work. In business, science and technology, however, its potential has hardly begun to be tapped.

Down to work

Now that the three main purposes for which taxonomies are used are understood, it is possible to put them together and link them to specific organisational, group and individual purposes. Making the case for a taxonomy or group of taxonomies is the next step, before we can move on to the design, implementation and maintenance phases (see sidebar – Making the case for using a taxonomy).

Please send comments and questions to jicwyllie@trendmonitor.com, with a subject heading ‘Taxonomies/purpose1’. You are also invited to e-mail your completed ‘Making the case’ forms (with a subject heading ‘Taxonomies/case1’). Assuming enough responses are received, an analysis of readers’ purposes for using taxonomies will be carried out and supplied free of charge to those who have contributed.

Sidebar: Example of an intelligence taxonomy

Global Economy Monitor (www.globaleconomymonitor.co.uk) publishes an annual intelligence report on consumers. The organisation has monitored the most prestigious English-language business sources over the past four years with the purpose of predicting how consumers will behave in the mid to long-term future. All items pertinent to each category are collected, classified and analysed for key facts and trends. Note how the taxonomy gives a coherent multi-perspective view of the consumer as an economic entity.

Income: Employment; Pay and conditions; Investment returns; Social security
Assets: House-holdings; Savings
Expenditure: Spending; Debt; Taxation
Attitudes: Confidence; Change

Sidebar: Making the case for using a taxonomy

1 – The work case: opening the door
1.1 Declaration of purpose
a. Purpose of initiative:
b. Purpose of taxonomy:
1.2 Questions
a. How will it increase productivity?
b. How will it stimulate motivation?
c. How does it improve the quality of knowledge and decision making?
d. How much training and change management is needed?
e. Identify indicators of success/failure.
f. How much will it cost?

2 – The community case: looking outside
2.1 Declaration of purpose
a. Purpose of initiative:
b. Purpose of taxonomy:
2.2 Questions
a. Who is affected? Who benefits/loses?
b. How can effects be mitigated/improved?
c. What are the political and public-relations opportunities/dangers?
d. What influence/communication is required?
e. Identify indicators of success and failure.
f. How much will it cost?

3 – The environmental case: including all our relations
3.1 Declaration of purpose
a. Purpose of initiative:
b. Purpose of taxonomy:
3.2 Questions
a. Who is impacted? Is impact positive or negative?
b. How can impacts be mitigated/amplified?
c. What are the political and public-relations opportunities/dangers?
d. What influence/communication is required?
e. Identify indicators of success and failure.
f. How much will it cost?

4 – The business case: the bottom line
4.1 Declaration of purpose
a. Purpose of initiative:
b. Purpose of taxonomy:
4.2 Questions
a. How will it save money?
b. How will it increase buyer satisfaction/sales?
c. How will it enhance public image/good will?
d. Set project scope, phasing and budget (add costs of other cases).
e. Estimate profit increase/decrease, capital appreciation/depreciation and rate of return.
f. Identify key non-financial indicators of success/failure.