Tagging Tools Offer Powerful Way to Organize Information

CIO —

Tagging offers a potentially powerful way for a company to organize information by making fresh content immediately searchable, letting users designate terms that make sense to them and providing users with a sense of ownership. This ability for tags to provide so much content-describing power for ordinary folks has given rise to the term "folksonomy," as opposed to the more restrictive sounding "taxonomy."

But like taxonomies, tags are all about finding data. "It’s another tool in the toolbox" for CIOs, says information architect Louis Rosenfeld. Rosenfeld notes that companies typically organize meta-data around attributes and values. Taxonomies often handle attributes well; a corporate library, for instance, can be organized quite well around book titles and authors. But if you want to search on a value—a book’s topic, say—things get harder. Searching through nontext, such as video, can also be a challenge.

Given their information density, Rosenfeld thinks intranets will be a prime testing ground for tagging at the corporate level. One company that has seen encouraging results using tags is IBM. "Tagging makes it easier for you to go back and find something," says Maria Arbusto, IBM’s director for user experience who is responsible for how IBM presents its internal information, websites and applications to employees.

Arbusto says IBM is "still in the early days" of using the terms employees provide to improve discoverability. She says it has worked well in a pilot involving ThinkPlace, the intranet application IBM uses as an internal suggestion box for ideas the company should consider commercializing or developing and deploying to employees. In the system, employees can comment on the ideas and rate whether they should be pursued.

ThinkPlace originally classified ideas using terms from IBM’s official taxonomies for content such as industry and products. But "we observed the users and saw that the terms they used didn’t always match" the formal taxonomy, she says. So IBM created a way for users to enter keywords, or tags, that would be appended to the suggested terms from the formal taxonomy and thereby improve their ability to find relevant ideas. The results have been promising, says Arbusto. "You can see what your colleagues are interested in," she says. "From a collaboration and knowledge-sharing perspective, that’s what’s neat about folksonomies."

Tags are synonymous with the keywords familiar to anyone who has done a search either on the Internet or in a corporate content management system. Indeed, many current applications come with tagging tools that let users append descriptive terms to their documents. (The upcoming Microsoft Vista operating system will even include tagging as a part of its file system.) Another valuable element of tagging is that it works with any kind of file, including video or audio. Users can simply add descriptive terms such as "exterior," "building," "blue," "quiet" and so on. This flexibility makes tagging "a very pragmatic technology"—simple to understand and use, says Andrew Jaquith, a Yankee Group analyst. No taxonomy can come up with every term employees might have for something. But with tagging, users gain the flexibility to work outside the taxonomy.

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