Title: How the World Bank built an enterprise taxonomy -- a story with a happy ending
1How the World Bank built an enterprise taxonomy
-- a story with a happy ending
- Denise A. D. Bedford, Ph.D.
- Senior Information Officer
- World Bank
- ASIST Potomac Valley Chapter presentation
- November 19, 2003
2Storytelling
- Im going to use a traditional Knowledge
Management tool tonight to tell you how we built
our enterprise taxonomy storytelling - My goal in using this approach is to illustrate
the technical, information architecture and the
social aspects of such an undertaking - It will also allow me to speak to some of the
critical foundation elements and milestones in
the process - It would not be truthful for me to tell you a
story about how one day we defined our
enterprise-taxonomy, and the next day we all
lived happily ever after! - Id like to take you back to the world of
medieval fiefdoms many systems, many rules,
different sets of laws, different languages and
grammars
3Once upon a time
- We had many different financial systems, multiple
document management systems, 100s of searchable
resources, and a number of gaps in coverage of
our information assets - Then a wise and foreseeing Chief Information
Officer and President helped us to establish a
stable, standard institutional platform for our
institutional collections (our modern day
Alexander the Great) - This meant that instead of having multiple
financial systems, human resource systems, and
document management systems, we had one to suit
each function (first thoughts of unification
arise) - And, the wise counselors advised them to select
systems that functioned on a common operating
system - Oracle (we agree to talk to establish
lines of communication and send ambassadors) - Enterprise begins to think of systems at an
enterprise level this is a crucial
organizational culture aspect to implementing an
enterprise taxonomy
4Consolidation of Business System Fiefdoms
- Before the dawn of the Knowledge Age, we had many
different business systems - Each business system had its own (or no)
metadata, classification schemes, indexes, search
systems - When we standardized our primary business
systems, we merged those different taxonomies
into enterprise taxonomies - In this first step, we still had multiple
business systems, but one per business function
5Laying Out the Information Empire
- Once we had established a common communication
foundation, the people in those different
fiefdoms began to talk to one another and a
cultural change began to occur - The idea of having one business system to
support a business function was accepted by the
masses - Now we find we have many different kinds of
taxonomies accounting structures, business
functions/process/task taxonomies, product
taxonomies, taxonomies of job classes, skills
taxonomies, organizational taxonomies, personnel
profiles, etc. - We built taxonomies in these business function
systems as we were implementing them - designed
to suit business functions and the people who
were administering the systems, not necessarily
end users - Start to understand important of usability and
end-user training -
6From Business to Information Systems
- Then a wise counselor (information architect) had
a vision of a common enterprise-document
management system - When we began looking for such a system, though,
the commercial products were not up to snuff in
terms of our requirements - We developed our own in-house system portions
of which were/were not using the common
foundation - The wise counselor had another vision of an
integrated enterprise information system that
would support a single point of access to all the
information within the information empire - This was the spark that set a the goal for an
integrated enterprise architecture and taxonomy,
though we were not sure we could actually achieve
it
7Document Management Systems
- Document management system was like a cathedral
that held the church network together smaller
churches represented the units contributing to
the system - Document management system architecture was a
little bit different, though - Took many years to convince the little churches
to send their offerings to the cathedral so they
could become part of the larger network - Each church could maintain their own filing
structures which served the creators not the
users - Eventually they agreed to use a common prayer
book common filing structure - Churches can speak different languages but they
all have to be able to communicate
8Document vs. Information Management Systems
Monasteries
Distribution
- Caution here goals of document and records
management systems are to store and preserve
information from the perspective of those who
created the information - End user access is not a primary goal of these
kinds of systems - Taxonomies that you put in place for these kinds
of systems dont necessarily serve end users
needs - Kinds of taxonomies organization filing
structures, record series for retention
dispositioning, economic sector and impact
categories, some minimal metadata is beginning to
emerge, though - These taxonomies serve filing and storage goals,
not the information access goal of our enterprise
taxonomy
9Renaissance Creativity Explodes
- While we were making good progress in
synchronizing different kinds of taxonomies in
all of these business areas, a creative
renaissance of knowledge creation and sharing
began - In about 1997, we launched a knowledge management
initiative, using Lotus Notes databases to
support collaboration and document libraries - Knowledge management was a cultural change in
itself creativity of organizational units was
encouraged and heightened - It was a very important source of cultural change
within the institution beginning of a
transformation to a learning organization - It meant that the masses could become interested
in taxonomies
10Renaissance Creativity Explodes
- Proliferation of writing, publishing and
organizing of information - Déjà vu all over again creativity took the form
of user-defined metadata, publishing and
navigation taxonomies - These taxonomies were different from any of the
taxonomies we had seen before reflected the new
thematic structure of the KM organization - In some respects there was more confusion because
they were talking about different kinds of
taxonomies but trying to fit them into the same
structures - We began some internal QuickStart educational
sessions on metadata, taxonomies, search,
semantic web, etc. to provide a framework
11Popular Information Revolution
- So now we have several business process systems,
a decentralized document management system,
knowledge management system and there is a
popular uprising the web - Many web towns are created - 100s of web sites,
1000s of web pages - No central coordination of virtual villages
- Too many different places to go to look for
information going back to the medieval
monastery network systems - Masses begin to surface their discontent with the
quality of access and the quality of information
that is being published - Realization among the masses that not all of the
quality information assets are electronic or
publicly available
12Popular Information Revolution
- Begins to look like the Dark Ages again - no
profiles, no taxonomies, no controlled
vocabularies or values - Different systems have different profiles,
different taxonomies, controlled vocabularies or
values, indexes, search systems - We start to see information pollution
alchemists and court jesters come back onto the
scene advocating magical approach to
discovering the enterprise architecture - But, we didnt give up we kept working on the
components of the infrastructure in the
background - We knew that the day would come when they would
be needed and that day came
13Rationalism Enlightenment
- Wise counselor returns to bring back sense of
rationalism and enlightenment - Counselor commissions a synthesis of content
types across systems, standard metadata scheme,
and the rejuvenation of the World Bank Thesaurus - Content of the information is what we focus on
for integration - Information architecture then derives from our
kinds of content - Synthesis and integration work outside of
existing systems, but leverages all the work that
is done within the business systems - Metadata is the central structure (faceted
taxonomy) - Reference sources for each facet support the
governance and quality control (flat,
hierarchical and network taxonomy structures)
14Scientific Revolution Industrialization
- About this time, the visionary counselor begins
to lay the work for a superhighway connecting all
information systems using the integrated
enterprise taxonomy as a blueprint - Content type proposal enterprise-wide review of
kinds of information is completed and accepted by
Information Architecture Committee - Establishment of Bank standard metadata
deriving from existing metadata across systems - Long-term search strategy proposed and submitted
to Information Architecture Committee - Simplified Enterprise Taxonomy for topics is
formed looking across all systems and looking
to the systems that are used by our partners
15Space Travel - Portals
- The wild and crazy growth of the external website
of the Bank, as well as the need to create a new
internal web services platform raised awareness
of the value of an integrated enterprise taxonomy
- You need some predictability in the source and
target systems before you can syndicate content
from an SAP BW cube, a newsfeed source, a DM
system, an RM system, Archives, and the InfoShop
to a project portal or to a personal portal, they
all need to have a common point of reference - The portal team tried the vendors suggested
approach create and implement simple new
hierarchies and use them throughout the portal - The enterprise taxonomy actually becomes the
technical and information infrastructure of the
portal metadata repository, global navigation
bars, - Taxonomies also now must be an integral part of
the content that you are creating in the portals
and in the systems that provide content to the
portals
16Back to Communications
- Vision of a whole-Bank search one place to go
to find information in any of the Banks systems,
speaking any of the languages of our clients - Vision involved having a search engine that spoke
the Banks business language and the languages of
our clients another kind of taxonomy - We had a print-based topical thesaurus which
needed to be updated and expanded to reflect the
Banks business in 2000 (moved this from 10,xxx
terms in 1997 to 92,xxx in 2003) - Same time the Translations Department was
implementing a new parallel translation system
which leverages multilingual and cross-language
glossaries - Translations Department glossaries focus on
business functions, WB Thesaurus focuses on
topics integration and cross-population now in
progress
17Transparency
- Policy on Information Disclosure (2002) approved
by the Board of Executive Directors required that
we - develop a metadata based, cross-system Catalog to
surface disclosed and disclosable documents for
the external public user - put in place a system that would support the
capture and tracking of disclosure requests in
the future and record changes in disclosure
status - This effort funded the first release of
whole-Bank search - Disclosed and disclosable documents lived in all
of those systems above and were not tagged with
their disclosure conditions or status - In order to deliver WB Catalog, we had to
integrate all of those taxonomies described above
as well as the long-term search strategy
18Information Universe
- Lets jump to the 21st century Enterprise
Content Architecture and Enterprise Content
Management - All those taxonomies we worked on for the past 15
years are now integral components of the
enterprise content architecture - Were finding that these taxonomies are critical
to efficient and effective use of portal
technologies - Allows us to shift the focus to information
content, metadata management, taxonomies, search,
access, security, disclosure. - Now the impetus is to bring them all under
central control so that they can be managed and
used by systems across the enterprise - Lets see what the enterprise taxonomy looks like
today, its content, how we maintain and manage it
19Information Universe
- We realize that we really do want to work and
travel in a 21st century universe of information - Space travel is not magical, but is based on good
engineering and maintenance - Managers need to understand that quick fixes and
solutions do not result in sustainable systems,
but rather result in significant investment
losses - A multi-dimensional design approach supports
flexibility, extensibility, and customization - We can view our information universe from several
different perspectives - Individual systems landscape
- A technical architecture landscape
- Users view of the enterprise taxonomy
- An information architecture landscape
- All of these views make up our Enterprise Content
Architecture and allow us to move to the next
step Enterprise Content Management
20Systems Architecture
World Bank Catalog/ Enterprise Search
Site Specific Searching
Publications Catalog
Recommender Engines
Personal Profiles
Portal Content Syndication
Browse Navigation Structures
Metadata Repository Of Bank Standard
Metadata (Oracle Tables Indexes)
Reference Tables Topics, Countries Document
Types (Oracle data classes)
Transformation Rules/Maps
Data Governance Bodies
Metadata Extract
Metadata Extract
Metadata Extract
Metadata Extract
Metadata Extract
Metadata Extract
Doc Mgmt System
Web Content Mgmt. Metadata
SAP Financial System
People Soft
JOLIS Metadata
InfoShop Metadata
Concept Extraction, Categorization
Summarization Technologies
21Technical View of the Enterprise Architecture
Content Contributor
End User
Content Systems
DELIVERY
Metadata Management and Security Services
ePublish
PDS
.
Content Management Services
Content Access Services
access rules
view
multilingual srch
workflow
check in/out
create/del.
retention schedule
search
syndication
versioning
declare
classification
browsing
notification
reference data
taxonomy
Content Integration and Archives Services
relate
Connector
Concept extraction
rules evaluator
harmonize
Adapter
thesaurus
data dic.
SAP (R/3, BW)
Notes / Domino
monitors
Archives Store
Over Time
Metadata warehouse
Documents, Images, Audio, Data records
logs
People Soft
iLAP
Repositories Services
Business Systems
22Users View of the Enterprise Taxonomy
23Information Architecture
Title
Keyword
Author
Content Type
Topics
Format
Bus. Activity
Disclosure
24Bank Standard Metadata by Purpose
Identification/ Distinction
Search Browse
Compliant Document Management
Use Management
25Taxonomies in Action
- Metadata in Fielded Search Faceted Taxonomy
- Topics Taxonomy Shallow Hierarchy
- Business Activity Taxonomy Deep Hierarchy
- Organizational Taxonomy Faceted Taxonomy
- Country Region Taxonomy Hierarchy
- Thesaurus in Search Faceted Taxonomy
- Disclosure Status Flat Taxonomy
26Top Tier Content Type Examples
- Documents in IRIS, ImageBank, IRAMS
- Data in BW, DEC SIMA queries in central, regional
agency databases, CDF indicators, GDF data
reports, . - Publications in JOLIS, Office of Publisher,
Thematic Group databases - Communications in External Affairs, Office of
President, DEC, IRIS - People Communities in YourNet, PeopleSoft,
WBDirectory, - Knowledge in Notes databases, Oral History
program, - Services in WB Yellow Pages, Service Portal,
- Collections in EIU database, Oxford Analytica
27Lessons Learned
- You can change some of the information
architecture, but some of it you will have to
adapt or map - Business functions are the most critical for
standardizing to single business taxonomy the
move towards standardization has to come from
above - Map business system taxonomies to enterprise
taxonomies - help the business system owners to
see the value of being part of an enterprise
taxonomy (no value, no buy in) - Expect change and be ready to integrate and map,
but educate your users to alert you to changes
make it possible for them to work with you - Do outreach and consciousness raising (QuickStart
programs on metadata, taxonomies 101, search
engines, semantic engines,
28Lessons Learned
- Move forward on the end user front while youre
working on the backend when people can see the
actual value they will buy in (now no one wants
to be left out of the WB Catalog now we created
it, so they are coming) - Have to have a goal and a vision you will never
succeed at creating an enterprise taxonomy if you
dont know why youre doing it - We are putting in place an enterprise
architecture based on well-defined and managed
taxonomies that are used within and by internal
systems - This gives us flexibility to build different
products and views for end users, while
internally managing our information assets