Building an Enterprise Taxonomy
Today’s enterprise contains hundreds of thousands of documents located in distributed content stores across various departments and global offices. Estimates predict that unstructured information doubles every three months [Gartner Group].
Employees require consistent and predictable access to this growing knowledge to effectively do their jobs. However, as each new piece of content is added, the ability of employees to find the information they need diminishes.
In the evolution of knowledge management, organizing information into an intuitive topical hierarchy or taxonomy has proven to be an efficient and productive way for end users to not only find, but also to discover information. The topic tree presents information in context, providing users the opportunity to quickly find relevant information for more informed decision-making.
Building a taxonomy or directory of enterprise content, however, has traditionally been a challenge. Until now, enterprises have had two options for taxonomy building and maintenance—fully manual or fully automated.
Manual Approaches—Accuracy at a High Cost
Manual approaches employ humans alone in the process of finding, screening and categorizing content. Corporate librarians or information managers define topics and literally comb through content to manually place relevant information in the right place.
This is a highly accurate process that provides the visibility and control necessary to deliver end users a useful directory of enterprise content. On the downside, this approach can require excessive resources, and does not easily scale to cope with the immense amount of information growing within the enterprise.
Automated Approaches—Trading Accuracy For Efficiency
Fully automated approaches leverage technology alone to provide the efficiency and scalability that manual solutions lack. By automating the process of finding, screening, and categorizing content, organizing knowledge becomes an efficient and quick-to-deploy initiative.
But the lack of visibility and control over the categorization engine’s decisions has lead to less than desirable accuracy. Today’s auto-categorization solutions deliver at best 60% to 70% accuracy. Mis-categorizing or losing one out of every three documents is simply unacceptable within the enterprise when organizing high-value or confidential information.
A Hybrid Approach—The Flexibility to Deliver Both Accuracy and Efficiency
Quiver addresses the accuracy and efficiency ‘trade-off’ by introducing a new and unique approach to organizing content—a hybrid approach. QKS Classifier™ organizes valuable content by combining the efficiency of technology with the accuracy of human judgment, driving increased productivity and more informed decision-making.
Using a unique combination of best-of-breed auto-categorization technology and human oversight acquired through an intuitive Directory Management Toolset, Quiver’s hybrid taxonomy platform delivers the most intuitive and accurate view of enterprise information assets.
State-of-the-art auto-classification technology automates the process of finding, screening, and categorizing information, enabling comprehensive and timely access to enterprise content.
The directory and workflow management interface provides granular control over exactly what information is included, who can access it, and how it is displayed. Clear visibility into the categorization engine decisions allows information managers maximum control of the employee experience.
A hybrid solution enables enterprises the ability to tune on a topic-by-topic level the amount of human oversight or automation. This ensures accuracy where accuracy is demanded—for topics like HR and R&D and efficiency where efficiency is desired—for topics like News.
An Intuitive Directory of Enterprise Content—Communicating Knowledge
A taxonomy provides a centralized, integrated search and browse experience for end users.
Delivering an intuitive browse interface to users:
- Increases informed decision-making; and;
- Helps users quickly find what they’re looking for and spend less time searching.A hybrid taxonomy platform has multiple applications within a variety of knowledge management initiatives:;
Augmenting advanced auto-categorization with human oversight is key to ensuring the highest quality directory for consistent and predictable information retrieval.
Quiver, Inc. develops and markets categorization software that provides the most intuitive and accurate view of knowledge assets. Building on its core technology competencies in information classification, ranking and retrieval, the company delivers Quiver Knowledge Suite ™ (QKS), a portfolio of information management products making Global 2000 enterprises more efficient and more productive.For more information, contact Quiver via 1-415-863-9945, info@quiver.com or Quiver