Posted by Paul Quigley 01 September 2009

When the SEO behemoth Google took the wraps off its new indexing for content application ‘Index Now‘ site search, the whole sphere of enterprise taxonomy andfolksonomies is conjured as the role ofknowledge management and context become ever more critical to effective content management strategies. Enterprises and organisations are starting to realise that holding generic lumps of content management assets are, in and of themselves, about as useful as the proverbial chocolate teapot. The world ofsemantics,ontology andKantian epistemology comes to mind in the vast ‘contextualisation’ process of content management, a veritable holy grail for all umbrella content in a massed digital asset world.

So where to start? Education. It’s by no means easy to grasp the intricate classification concepts involved in transmuting classical taxa into an enterprise environment and many software solutions are by their nature, generic and not designed to limit an organisation’s requirement for a new bespoke taxonomy, given that one-size-does-not-fit-all when it comes to how businesses and organisation intend to utilise their content stack.

Therefore, hurtling headlong into a content management implementation or upgrade project is intrinsically unsafe. The waters need very much to be tested and probed robustly well before any software and infrastructure solution should be entertained.

That said, there is a wealth of existing knowledge and expertise within the realms of the solutions providers. Whilst they would be the first to emphasize the unlikeliness of a template taxonomical solution, the field of business process management can also often help the newcomer and experienced practitioners alike in steering them towards an appropriate taxonomy-cum-process solution to fit the purpose of the ECM solution.