Document Taxonomies

One of the first real struggles I had with Synergy was to try to set up a robust “taxonomy” (or classification system) for documents.. In one respect it’s not critical, as you can move documents fairly easily from one category to another. But the more documents that you have in the repository, the more work it will be. I did a small study of knowledge management to get ideas. Here’s one article that might help.

One of the reasons it is difficult to set something up for the entire Enterprise is that not everyone thinks like everyone else (or at least they don’t necessarily think like I do). So it’s important to talk to the intended users of the system to find out how they currently store documents and how they retrieve them. Most organizations today, unless they already have a formal document storage system, use their PC and network resources to store documents. So here’s where I went to look first:

Shared drives on the network – this is usually the biggest source of information
Shared folders in Outlook
Local drives
Intranet (if they have one)
Public web site
Outlook personal folders
Any existing software system that stores conversations, notes, etc

When I interviewed folks the vast majority were more than willing to help and willing to give up their “private stash” of information to help themselves and others.