Taxonomies can be powerful tools. But too often, their complexity defeats the users they are supposed to help. The business taxonomy offers a simpler alternative.

By Zach Wahl

Regardless of how an organisation has designed its taxonomy and regardless of how that taxonomy is supposed to be used, the same issue keeps cropping up: the end users of these taxonomies cannot use them or, more accurately, won’t use them.

In reality, I believe the issue is even more specific in many cases. The real problem with many of the taxonomy designs that have been implemented is that they simply do not make sense to the people who are being asked to use them. A perfect example comes from a US government agency that came to us to ask why the taxonomy it had spent so much time, resources and energy designing, to support its portal and content management systems, was not being used.

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