Making the Business Case for Taxonomy [2005]

Presented at the Taxonomy Boot Camp, Sept. 27-28, 2005, New York, NY.

This presentation argues the business case for implementing a taxonomy. Its core idea is that while tagging content costs money, the real benefit comes from using that tagging to cut costs or increase revenue. The presentation identifies that knowledge workers spend significant time searching for information and often end up recreating content that already exists. Research shows that using a category-based taxonomy interface is significantly faster (36%-48%) than a standard search list. Finally, it provides a sample 5-year ROI calculation, including costs for software, tagging, and taxonomy creation, which projects a payback period of 1.4 years based on productivity and efficiency gains. The key takeaway is to “sell the vision” of what the taxonomy enables, not the taxonomy itself.