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In her presentation this morning at the KMWorld Taxonomy Bootcamp taking place in Washington DC, Marjorie Hlava, President of Access Innovations, claimed the number one problem that most organizations experience with taxonomy development: applying what they develop.

In her session, she walked through some of the gaps between intention and reality, stating that "most organizations do not take the necessary steps to implement what they have developed. They are just not consistent" in how they apply. This usually happens after an organization spends valuable time and resources in defining process and taxonomy. But without follow through to deploy the taxonomy, and without consistent application of the taxonomy and needed governance principles, much of this effort can be wasted.

Of course, this is a problem that goes beyond metadata and taxonomy spheres, and is a common trait of large, complex IT projects, in general. But while the statistics behind IT project failures is widely reported, the devil is in the details as to why many of these projects fail. My own experience has shown that a majority of these projects fail in large part to a failure to fully plan, or to fully implement against the plan. As Ms. Hlava stated, consistency is the issue behind the failures to deploy taxonomy plans.

According to Ms. Hlava, there are some best practices that you can consider:

• Follow the data. Understand what is being used, where to look to build out your taxonomy.
• Look at the data format, and content format. Build your taxonomy based on what needs to be searchable, not just based on common metadata, such as title and author. Dig a bit deeper.
• Design taxonomy for the data. Your taxonomy may vary based on the types of data being tracked.
• Leverage the standards. Understand them and utilize this expert knowledge to better capture and classify your data.
• Use taxonomy to tag data. Where the rubber meets the road. You need to actually apply it. Here's where many plans fall down - execution.
• Choose search and repository software for data. Don't force fit the technology. Understand your needs first, and then find the right technology to meet your needs.
• Load the data into the system. Don't compromise your plans over tool limitations. Cut corners and you undo all of your hard work.
• Keep your eye on the target. Remember that at the end of the day its about your end users. If they cannot find the content they need, your system is broken.

Building out your taxonomy is a hard task, but crucial to the long-term success of SharePoint or your content management system. Develop a strategy and stick to it.