Taking the taxing out of Taxonomy

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Taking the taxing out of Taxonomy

• Lessons from a CMS Implementation

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A brief history of CMS at CHC

• CMS provides consistency, centralization and a
  robust audit trail all necessary components for
  a safety oriented company
• CHC had large, sudden growth by acquisition and
  amalgamation
• CHC had traditional silos issues

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Whats in this for your organization?

• Better understand the various levels of change
  that a CMS forces on an organization
• Learn about the process by which CHC arrived at
  needing and defining a taxonomy
• Glean some lessons learned without having to
  blunder through them yourself

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What triggered a CHC taxonomy?

• Frustration with Help files that only explained
  how and never why or when
• Began day-dreaming about being able to find
  information in CHC documentation faster and more
  accurately
• Asked myself rhetorical questions aboutwhat Joe
  Pilot wants to know

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What thwarts a taxonomy project?

• CHC is an action-oriented culture without a lot
  of patience for technology that doesnt deliver
• Relationship is king, procedures are not
• Planning takes courage
• Burning bridges with IT
• Keep the motto extensible, portable, usable in
  mind at all times

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How does the motto help?

• Extensible
• Dont get into plans that cant grow with you
• Portable
• Avoid getting into proprietary solutions as much
  as possible (W3C approved is best)
• Usable
• Make the solution fit todays needs, notjust
  tomorrows dreams

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How does this relate to taxonomy?

• Three versions of the CHC solution, first two
  vetoed because they couldnt meet the motto
• The FAQ version (not usable)
• The taxonomy markup and 3rd party search engine
  solution (not portable)
• The symmetrical markup and search phase(the best
  to date)

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CHCs approach explained

• Devise a two-level taxonomy for coarse searching
  and get buy in early from all stakeholders
• Leave the fine searching for each departments
  back of the book index tags
• Put all the content into one cross-divisional
  intranet page and support it with search logic
  that mirrors the markup logic

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Finally, the search logic

• Six main search criteria came to light
• Wondering about generic topics
• Filtering by audience profiles
• Putting concepts in a CHC context
• Providing CHC guidelines and best practices
• Referring to or explaining compliance issues
• Defining and prescribing compliance-related
  procedures

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Three layers, two sides each
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The challenges before us

• Getting buy in for the taxonomy and the
  categorizations
• Agreeing on terms their use, their scope and
  even their spelling
• Building the tagging tool for authors
• Building the search tool for the single intranet
  page that houses all CHC content

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Future goals

• Linking the knowledge-base output to their
  corresponding PDFs
• Provides autonomy for each division and
  department on how to file their manuals on the
  intranet
• Retains the sense of 11 ratio between the
  knowledge base and the manuals that crews can
  order from the technical library

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Future goals continued

• The first layer of searchability will only have
  drop downs from the taxonomy and predefined
  categorizations
• Future searches will have natural language
  capability this will require a large see also,
  see instead project

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The bottom line

• Taxonomies can be basic, leveraged with
  procedures that are actually followed due to well
  managed relationships
• Extensible, portable, usable is a helpful motto
  for CMS planning
• CMS facilitates
• Consistency (terms, output styles)
• Integrity (re-use, linking, writing style)
• Transparency (searchability, accessibility)