Taxonomies and the Digital Employee Experience (DEX)

Helping employees find information within their organizations is one the uses of taxonomies. Implemented in an ECM, SharePoint, or other Intranet platform, taxonomy terms can link users to desired content more precisely and comprehensively than by search alone. I wrote intranet taxonomies in a recent blog post “Intranet and ECM Taxonomies.” In the meantime I have gained a better appreciate for the efforts to improve the digital workplace after attending a conference on the subject, the IntraTeam Event, held March 2-4, in Copenhagen, Denmark (and also meets in Stockholm, Sweden, in the fall), but on by the company IntraTeam. Now in its 15^th year, the conference is in the process of rebranding itself as the European DEX conference. DEX stands for digital employee experience. I’ve participated in a digital experience conference before, but that conference focused more on the customer digital experience than the employee digital experience.

I learned several things about digital employee experience, especially through the excellent keynote presented by James Robertson, consultant of Step Two Designs. James explained that DEX involves content, internal communications, support for corporate culture, collaboration and social tools, and a place for online tasks. He also emphasized that a digital workplace is the sum total of digital interactions within the workplace environment and not merely that between the staff and the organization. I also learned that good digital customer experience depends on good digital employee experience.

IntraTeam Event Copenhagen, keynote talk, March 3, 2020

I’m not going to summarize the conference, because others have already done that, including Steve Bynghall, who wrote “Six takeaways fromthe IntraTeam 2020 Conference on DEX” and Fredric Landqvist, who wrote “The emerging digital Work Experience,” where he mentioned "One challenge still remains, Findability."

As for the role of taxonomies, they serve findability and can help employees find not only content but also online spaces where they can perform activities and collaborate. Another way to look at taxonomies in support of DEX is that taxonomies can and should be designed with the users needs and experience in mind. This is what gives taxonomy design for internal users an advantage over designing taxonomies for external users: we have access to the users and can talk to them about what they need and desire, and thus the taxonomy can be suited for the employee user experiences. It is typical in an internal taxonomy project to interview numerous users of the intranet, not merely about the content they create but also about what information they seek and what online tasks they perform. By contrast, externally facing taxonomy creation does not usually involve gathering any information directly from customers or other external visitors of the website. So, when creating an internal taxonomy, I ask employees what topics, document types, and Intranet pages the often look for and what do they most often use the intranet for.

I recently completed a taxonomy project for an organization’s SharePoint intranet and thus presented at this conference (in addition to a pre-conference workshop on taxonomies) on the subject of taxonomies for SharePoint. Questions from the audience afterwards focused on the issues of tagging with the taxonomy. Since a positive digital employee experience is important, I would advise not to make tagging mandatory for everyone, but rather delegate the responsibility to a couple of people within each business unit who have the interest and (with training) the aptitude for tagging. They may also take more of an active role in making suggestion for new terms or other improvements to the taxonomy. 

While I enjoyed the opportunity to travel to Copenhagen, I also hope to see DEX conferences in the United States. For now, there tend to be conferences on digital experience, but not focused on employees, and conferences on the digital workplace, but not focused on the experience of the employees.

Intranet and ECM Taxonomies

In designing a taxonomy for tagging and retrieving content in intranets or in an enterprise content management (ECM) system, there is a fundamental question of whether to strive for creating a single comprehensive taxonomy to be applied throughout the enterprise or to have multiple specific taxonomies for different sets of content and different groups of users within the enterprise, or both. This question involves not only issues of information usability and user experience but also a mindset, which could involve a goal of “breaking down silos” by having a single enterprise taxonomy or one of encouraging “democracy” among organizational units and letting them create their own local taxonomies or terms sets (with training).

The main advantage of a single, global taxonomy is to enable users to effectively search and refine/filter results across all the content within an enterprise system using the same parameters. Users then don’t need to know in which intranet site or sub-site the desired content is to be found. Users need only become familiar with a single taxonomy, not multiple. So, it becomes easier to use. Content can be better shared and discovered.

On the other hand, more, specific taxonomies can also be of value, providing more precise retrieval results by users who know where and how to search with them. In many organizations, there are very specific sets of documents, for which a specific taxonomy would aid in retrieval, yet they can be of value to any employee. For example, in an organization that conducts research, these could be research reports or profiles of experts. In an organization that provides services, these could be documents of service descriptions, procedures, and policies. In and an organization with a large sales operation, these could be all the documents that support salespeople. The design of a taxonomy should reflect the  nature and the scope of the content and the needs of all users. Content in specialized repositories (research reports, experts, service documents, sales support documents, etc.) ought to have customized taxonomies to more fully support the best options in retrieval. For example, a taxonomy for research reports needs to be detailed in research subject areas. A taxonomy for experts would include areas of expertise, departments, locations, and job titles. A taxonomy for service support documents needs to be detailed in types of services and document types and should also include a set of terms for market segment. A set of taxonomies in support of sales should likely include product categories, sales function or process stage, market, and customer type. Meanwhile, a “generic” taxonomy, to be used across the organization, might be based on departments and types of functions/activities, along with general document types and topics.

It may be unclear who should decide and how the decision should be made regarding global, enterprise vs. specific, departmental taxonomies. The decision should probably be left to those in the organization who lead knowledge management or content strategy. The IT department, which sets up the Intranet, ECM, or SharePoint  system may have influence in this matter, based on how they choose to configure the system.  There can also be uncertainty and ambivalence over which taxonomy approach to take. During my interview with stakeholders for a recent SharePoint taxonomy consulting project, a lead IT stakeholder said that there was no policy, but that they “encourage” departments to use the same topical taxonomy. Yet at the say time, they also “create a local classification, but don’t encourage a local classification.”

Approaches to intranet taxonomies

Let’s look more closely at the various options for intranet taxonomy design.

1. Create a general enterprise-wide taxonomy and various departmental-specific taxonomies.
Benefits: Taxonomies are suited to the content
Drawbacks: Has silos and less sharing. User outside of a department may not be familiar with the departmental taxonomy.

2. Create a single comprehensive taxonomy (or set of taxonomies/facets) to cover all the internal information needs of the organization.
Benefits: There is more sharing and ease of having a single taxonomy of terms for users to refine searches by.
Drawbacks: It is more difficult for tagging with a large and potentially confusing taxonomy, where sections of the taxonomy are irrelevant to some sets of taxonomy, and some terms may have been intended for one purpose but get used for another purpose.

Other options are more creative, and hopefully IT can customize the content management and search software accordingly to support them.

1. Create an enterprise-wide taxonomy, as a master taxonomy, which is both general and specific, and various specific taxonomies, and map the specific taxonomies, term-by-term, to the master taxonomy which includes all terms. Those who tag only need to use their appropriate specific taxonomies, but those who search, making use of the master taxonomy, can have a “federated search” experience allowing discovery and retrieval across the enterprise.

2. Create a single comprehensive taxonomy with branches that can be hidden from display to those tagging content which does not require the terms from those branches of the taxonomy. This makes it easier for those who tag, not being overwhelmed with a very large taxonomy, much of which is not relevant to their content, and contains terms which could potentially be confusing and misused.

As I was struggling with the problem with my current client on whether to make a large taxonomy (500-600 terms) available for tagging in all SharePoint sites, even though it was relevant to only a minority of the sites, the IT stakeholder informed me that for designated sites he could set the display of the taxonomy for tagging of just one top-level branch of the taxonomy and hide the rest. Although no more than one branch could be displayed in this method, which would impact the hierarchical design of the taxonomy, this was the best compromised solution in this case.

I look forward to sharing and learning more about taxonomies for intranets at the upcoming IntraTeam Event Copenhagen: The European DEX Conference, where I will be giving a pre-conference workshop "Taxonomy Design & Creation."