In episode 74 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Gretyl Kinsey and Simon Bate continue their discussion about the benefits of establishing a taxonomy.
“Communicate with the stakeholders. Don’t just get their input and then go away. Communicate all along what you’re doing and identify your benefits.”
—Simon Bate

Related links: 

* The benefits of a taxonomy (podcast, part 1)
* Tips for developing a taxonomy in DITA

Twitter handles:

* @gretylkinsey
* @simonbate

Transcript: 
Gretyl Kinsey:     Welcome to The Content Strategy Experts podcast brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize, and distribute content in an efficient way.
GK:     In this episode, we continue our discussion about the benefits of establishing a taxonomy. This is part two of a two part podcast.
GK:     So if you are at an organization and you have never had any sort of taxonomy in place and you’re starting to realize that you need something to help categorize your information, how do you go about starting that process to build a taxonomy?
Simon Bate:     Well, the first thing of course, is to meet with your project sponsor, the person who’s really asking for this thing and get a sense of what’s their purpose and rationale and what’s the actual purpose, why are you building out the taxonomy.
SB:     So then you want to, once you get a sense of that, you can map the scope of the project, including the knowledge domains and both visible and invisible stakeholders in those domains. So in meeting with the sponsor, you find out what do they need and who has a major stake in it.
GK:     Yeah, absolutely. And I think it’s really important. A lot of people I think skip that step of getting that sponsor buy-in upfront. Especially if you’re not the one who has the power to or the finances to sponsor that taxonomy yourself, then it’s really important to make sure that you have someone who does have that power to be your ally and really help understand what you need. And so if that person’s not the driving force behind it, but maybe you are, but maybe you’re not in any sort of management or leadership role where you have control over finances, it’s really important to talk to whoever does have that power and make sure that, between the two of you, you can get on the same page and prove to them. Here is the business advantage of establishing a taxonomy and here’s what we are losing if we don’t establish one. Here are all the customer frustrations with not being able to find this information in this way and that will kind of help you get over that first hurdle.
SB:     Yeah, absolutely. Having a justification, demonstrable return on investment or whatever, is really important before you can get started on any project like this.
SB:     So actually once you’ve then gone past that first step, you’ve got a buy in there, then the next thing to do is to go to those stakeholders that you identified and engage with them. You want to validate your map of the scope, you need to understand their needs and it’s really, really important.
SB:     If you try and start building a taxonomy out and you don’t include all the stakeholders, you’re setting yourself up for problems later essentially.
GK:     Yeah, and we’ve seen lots of cases where that happened where maybe one department or one small group within a department started a taxonomy because they had an immediate need for i...