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Knowledge

Making the Case for Business Taxonomy

Friday, 17 July 2009 13:57

Over the last decade vast amounts of information have flowed from individual sources such as personal hard drives, file shares, and hard copies into electronic repositories, including portals, intranet websites, and document management systems. With these content migrations, the management of this information has changed drastically. As many of these online systems are owned and managed by “average” business users, the responsibility for the proper placement and tagging of content shifted from a small group of librarians and information professionals to a much wider pool of content managers. This democratization of content management has yielded significant benefits. Information is generally more accessible and more readily shared. However, it has also commonly resulted in mismanaged content placed in areas that are unintuitive for users or subjected to incomplete or inconsistent tags, making it difficult for users to find.

Who are Information Workers?

Business users are becoming increasingly frustrated with the tools they have for finding the information they need to do their jobs. This frustration was highlighted in a 2007 Accenture survey of 1,000 middle managers that showed managers spend up to 2 hours a day looking for information and that more than 50 percent of the information they find has no value to them.

Business users often have problems finding information because the data discovery and analysis tools provided by vendors often assume, incorrectly, that the user has a detailed working knowledge of the business data involved, knows where to find it, and is able to use fairly sophisticated software tools for finding and using the business data they require.

Understanding Search Engine Optimization

Search engines are a primary way that many users will find your site, so ensuring that your pages will appear as high as possible in the results is a key factor in increasing the number of site visitors.

Early Search Techniques

In the mid-1990s, as the Web began to rise in popularity, the first search engines appeared to help users find information in the exponentially increasing number of pages on the Web.

These early search engines relied on Web masters to selfdescribe their pages by using the meta element in HTML to add keywords and descriptions of the page content. Unfortunately, it became too easy to manipulate the system by inserting keywords that contained popular search terms yet had no relation to the page in question.

Simple Guidelines for Choosing right CMS

The content management system you choose can really make a huge difference in how much time you (or your clients) spend keeping a site updated and maintained. There’s a huge variety out there—some estimates put the number at around 1700 different options. Some are great…some, not so much.

Below are ten useful guidelines to consider when choosing a CMS, followed by rundowns on ten great CMS options available and how they stack up based on the guidelines.