Company taxonomy development: the case of an international emergency response organization
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/AJIM-09-2015-0140 |
| Published date | 21 March 2016 |
| Date | 21 March 2016 |
| Pages | 193-211 |
| Author | Haakon Lund,Susanne Ørnager |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Information behaviour & retrieval |
Company taxonomy development:
the case of an international
emergency response organization
Haakon Lund and Susanne Ørnager
University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark
Abstract
Purpose –The purpose of this paper is to explore theoretically and empirically the understanding
and implementation of an information taxonomy in the UN organization World Food Programme
(WFP) by analysing users’information behaviour and by establishing a minimum set of cross-silo
metadata (taxonomy).
Design/methodology/approach –The study implies the use of both qualitative and quantitative
methods. This includes desk review of key documents and interviews with information architecture
staff from various WFP units; data collection carried out as semi-structured staff interviews in
WFP; log analyses of search log-files from WFP intranet portal (WFPgo) from September to November
2013, the results were applied and a suggested taxonomy tested at workshops conducted for the
staff in headquarters.
Findings –The results reveal an organization with a high demand for easier access to information
and knowledge, greater internal collaborations and stronger links with various sources of knowledge.
Staff participating in the various workshops pointed out that work processes as well as the human
resources component cannot be left out of a solution development.
Originality/value –There has been little research carried out on current taxonomy projects in
corporate environments and international emergency response organizations and few has touched on
how knowledge organization systems can enhance or constrain staff’s ability to access online content.
Keywords Information and knowledge management, Card sorting, Company taxonomy,
Information architecture, Knowledge organization systems, Log analyses
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
Most large organizations use intranet for internal communication and knowledge
exchange. Regrettably, a companywide policy for defining the scope of the implemented
intranet and in several cases a suitable communication strategy for employing
information on the intranet is missing (White, 2010). This often results in reluctance by
staff to use the intranet actively for seeking information since the experiences are
frequently unproductive and time-consuming. This may lead to solutions only supporting
the information needs within isolated parts or departments of the organization in what can
be described as siloed information and systems, i.e. information systems created by one
organizational unit in isolation, with the intended use by this unit (Fenwick et al., 2009;
Tariq et al., 2014).
Poor information architecture of the main corporate intranet portal is another
barrier for user acceptance. The information architecture is here regarded as the
structure of the intranet including use of metadata, navigational structure, search
facilities, organization of document repositories/management systems and page layout. Aslib Journal of Information
Management
Vol. 68 No. 2, 2016
pp. 193-211
©Emerald Group Publis hing Limited
2050-3806
DOI 10.1108/AJIM-09-2015-0140
Received 7 September 2015
Revised 6 December 2015
Accepted 18 January 2016
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/2050-3806.htm
The authors would like to acknowledge Signe Ratjen and Stine Netman who conducted
interviews with WFP staff. The study was supported by World Food Programme under grant
WFP/ITHQ/2013/4800211616.
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Company
taxonomy
development
If users encounter poor information architecture they may apply for alternative
information access strategies like the use of personal contacts, the use of external
search engines (e.g. Google) and the use of external information systems such as
Facebook, Twitter, etc.
The Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) (Davis, 1989) has become widely used as
a model for explaining users acceptance of information systems. The TAM model
operates with two core concepts, “perceived ease of use”and “perceived usefulness”as
explanations to what degree a system is accepted. The “perceived ease of use”is the
amount of effort a user has to invest in using a system and a systems “perceived
usefulness”is to what degree a user thinks he will benefit from using the system.
If users finds that a system fails on either the perceived ease of use or perceived
usefulness (or both) it can lead to users rejecting the system.
According to Stocker et al. (2014) only a few research papers have been published on
how employees search for information within an organization including how
useful users finds intranet search facilities or enterprise search (Stocker et al., 2014,
p. 2). The company Findwise (2014) reported in a survey with 277 participants that
43 per cent of the respondents found it hard to very hard to find information within the
organization. Of these, 50 per cent of the respondents were from large organization
(more that 1,000 employees). When asked what the obstacles users encounted, approx.
40 per cent indicate inconsistency in tagging content and approx. 45 per cent lack of
adequate tags, i.e. metadata.
Taxonomy is a conceptual framework for structuring content so organizations and
employees can easily locate what they need. When used in the framework of the
internet, taxonomy refers to the effective structuring of content within a defined scope
that facilitate easy and accurate access and it is understood as a component of the
information architecture (ANSI/NISO Z39.19, 2005). A corporate taxonomy is an
important tool for establishing an efficient information architecture (Gilchrist, 2001,
2003; Chaudhry and Jiun, 2005; Broughton, 2006a).
However, there is no single agreed definition of a taxonomy either within
information architecture (Morville and Rosenfeld, 2007) or information science. It may
be understood in a number of ways as theories or frameworks. According to Garshol
(2004) the term taxonomy has been widely used and abused to the point that when
something is referred to as taxonomy it can be just about anything, though usually it
will mean some sort of abstract structure. He defines taxonomy to mean a subject-
based classification that arranges the terms in a controlled vocabulary into a hierarchy
without doing anything further.
Lambe (2007) claims that common definitions of taxonomies often limit themselves
to hierarchies. He states that in its basic definition, a taxonomy is a structured
set of names and descriptions used to organize information and documents in a
consistent way.
Whittaker and Breininger (2008) define a taxonomy as a controlled vocabulary, in
which each term usually holds hierarchical relationships, which means that a
taxonomy imposes a topical structure on information.
The term taxonomy is used by Hedden (2010) as a framework. In the narrow sense,
to mean a hierarchical classification or categorization system, and in the broad sense,
in reference to any means of organizing concepts of knowledge.
A taxonomy is according to the Special Interest Group of the American Society for
Indexing (Taxonomies, 2013) defined as a controlled vocabulary with a hierarchical
structure, with the shared understanding that there are different definitions of a hierarchy.
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