To make omelettes, you have to break eggs - but do it very, very carefully!

Last week I presented to Ark Group's Business Information Taxonomies Conference on the topic "Understanding the Purpose of Your Taxonomy and Ensuring Business Adoption" at the Avillion Hotel.

My uploaded presentation can be found here.

In case you are wondering, a (very loose) definition of information taxonomy is a way of classifying and categorising the creation of unstructured information in a way that lets you more easily identify what is contained in the document, and how it relates to areas of your organisation. Although this helps with the search process (you can determine at a glance what a document is about rather than full-text searching for it).

One of the interesting things I discovered at the conference was the presentation by Verity on their tools, one of which (Verity Profiler) claims to be able to automatically classify a document into a taxonomy with about 85% accuracy.

The underlying theme of my presentation, however, was that generally people in business are very good at presenting the benefits of an information taxonomy, but are rarely able to really articulate a low-risk methodological approach to actually implementing the information taxonomy (or business classification scheme) in a way that actually has people use it.

So the benefits are fairly clear, but our ability to state how it is to be done, and to convince business management that it will actually achieve real outcomes, is often less clear.

So as I say, to make omelettes, you have to break eggs - but do it very, very carefully in case you break the business too!