What We Learned about Taxonomy Working on the Railroad

Description: This presentation describes a project where we helped a regional transit authority digitize its paper records. The pandemic shifted the project’s focus from space-saving to enabling remote work. A unique, bottom-up approach was used to develop separate taxonomies for each department, emphasizing use cases and iterative validation. The project highlighted the importance of location as a key organizing principle for the transit authority’s information, with challenges arising from the pandemic.
Venue: Information Architecture Conference
Date: March 31, 2023
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[Slide 1] What We Learned about Taxonomy Working on the Railroad

Information Architecture Conference, March 30-April 1, 2023, New Orleans

Joseph Busch and Laurinda Alcorn, Taxonomy Strategies

[Slide 2] Introduction

Over the past couple of years, coincident with the height of the pandemic and the succeeding months of the “it’s-best-to-work-from-home” waves of COVID surges, we engaged with a major regional transit authority, to help them reduce paper documents through digital scanning. A wide-ranging multi-jurisdiction railway, bus, and paratransit system, the Authority had undertaken this initiative to eliminate legacy paper records, to downsize their footprint while relocating 3,000 office-based employees that were spread across 10 aging buildings originally planned and configured nearly 50 years ago in the 1970’s and 80’s. The disparate facilities resulted in a fragmented workforce, and also had deferred maintenance and safety issues. The Authority was relocating most of these employees to 3 new office buildings.

[Slide 3]

The goal of consolidating these employees to 3 regional buildings was to save money, and also hopefully to break down the silos and encourage collaboration among departments and teams. The challenge is that the new facilities are smaller office spaces, and the spaces are configured for new ways of working with office hoteling, hot desking, and privacy and collaboration areas. There will be limited space for personal materials such as paper files, engineering plans, and reference materials. To help plan for and prepare employees for the move to the new work environment, the Authority hired change management consultants. Those consultants hired us to develop and execute the plan to more or less eliminate legacy paper records and reference materials. This involved developing the metadata strategy (aka taxonomy), doing the scanning, and building the repository that would become the system of record for legacy documents.

[Slide 4] Accidental Digital Transformation

But as the pandemic caused the Authority to make an abrupt shift to remote work, the focus of this engagement transformed into helping a bureaucracy which had no culture of remote work be able to work remotely. 

[Slide 5] Our normal process is to: 

[Gather and Analyze Information]. Survey an organization overall by reviewing the information systems, processes, and plans; gathering quantitative and qualitative information about content and user behavior; and analyzing how users interact with content. To do this we gather and analyze:

• Query logs, usage statistics (called analytics), and usability surveys; 
• Any existing user research;
• Any documentation related to audience personas, content organization, metadata, keywords, and any other guidelines or standards;
• Any internal classifications such as org charts, records retention schedules, codes of conduct, and product and services lists; and
• Any relevant industry standard classifications such as Federal Railroad Administration Train Accident Cause Codes.

[Interview Stakeholders].

One-on-one interviews or group workshops with business, information management, IT representatives, and sometimes customers are an efficient and effective way to gather information and documentation. 

• We recruit people from business-critical functions including people who have credibility, are early adopters, hold large amounts of content, and are “squeaky wheels” or “geeks.”
• We aim to conduct 10-20 interview sessions.
• One objective is for these stakeholders to become the review board during the taxonomy development process, and beyond.

[Define Use Cases]

Based on analyzing this quantitative and qualitative information we define use cases. A use case is a written description of how users will perform tasks. It outlines, from a user’s point of view, a sequence of simple steps, beginning with a user’s goal and ending when that goal is fulfilled. The purpose of the taxonomy use case is to help define its scope, by thinking through both the strategic and practical goals of the taxonomy. A use case can be one or more sentences in the language of the user that describes what the user needs to do. Use cases can be helpful in later validating whether the taxonomy will address its intended purpose, and making adjustments during the process to refocus the work.

[Build High-Level Taxonomy]

Once research and requirements gathering has been completed, we build a high-level outline of the taxonomy and review it with the core stakeholder team. Instead of a single hierarchy, we usually adopt a faceted approach with distinct divisions for key contexts. We identify the 

• Types of documents, 
• Unique identifiers,
• Names of people, organizations, or locations,
• Types of services or business activities,
• Relevant events and dates.

We identify and reuse any existing terminology resources because these will be familiar to the users and make adoption of the new taxonomy easier. We recommend:

• Getting agreement on the broad divisions first, then building-out the detailed taxonomy;
• Only creating categories for which there already is content, or likely to be content soon;
• Keeping the taxonomy broad and shallow; and
• Rolling-up more specific terms into broader categories.

[Slide 6]

In this case, we were asked instead to adopt a bottom-up approach where we designed a process to be executed iteratively department-by-department. We:

• Surveyed each Department or business unit separately;
• Interviewed stakeholders separately in a departmental focus group;
• Defined use cases, metadata, and vocabularies separately (the taxonomy) for each Department;
• Validated the taxonomy with the Department against their use cases; and
• Generated a metadata specification separately for each Department.

We applied best practices and guided departments toward emerging commonalities, but at the end of the day, each department got their own separate taxonomy.

[Slide 7]

This diagram illustrates the process we used at the Authority. There were 7 discrete steps in the metadata work package undertaken for each department. These were:

1. Self-administered Document Types survey.
2. Facilitated focus group to refine the Document Types from the survey.
3. Draft a taxonomy consisting of the metadata specification, any controlled vocabularies, file naming conventions, and use cases for each Document Type.
4. Report on the Discovery activities and proposed taxonomy.
5. A web-based taxonomy Validation activity.
6. Report on the Validation activity results.
7. Compilation of the Specification for generating the relevant metadata for each Document Type during the scanning operation.

The scanning operation included quality assurance steps to ensure that all documents were accurately scanned, and that all documents had relevant metadata associated with them. The final digital files for each Department were sent to the Authority and loaded into the enterprise content management (ECM) repository. Following user acceptance testing (UAT) the source documents were destroyed, returned to the Department, or sent to the Authority archives per the Department’s instructions. 

Now let’s take a closer look at the metadata strategy part of this project.

[Slide 8] The Document Survey

Following a kick-off meeting, a document survey template shown in this slide was distributed for the Department to complete. The document survey needed to be completed at least one day before the departmental focus group was scheduled, usually one week following the kick-off meeting. 

The type of documents that were held in the Departments varied widely. Paper documents in file folders or binders, including drawings of any size, were in scope for the project. Bound volumes, microforms, electronic files on any media (disks, thumb drives, etc.) were out of scope. 

[Slide 9] The Focus Group.

Each focus group was scheduled for two hours. The agenda was primarily to discuss each type of document that was identified in the survey. The goal of the focus group was to identify for each type of document: 

1. The primary way or ways that the department organized the documents, 
2. The primary way or ways that the department searched for the documents, and 
3. Typical use cases related to the documents. 

Focus groups were conducted in person so that employees could show us examples of documents to help us understand their form and use. At the end of the focus group, we conducted a quick survey of the number of linear feet of materials, to estimate the number of pages of documents for planning the scanning effort.

[Slide 10] Taxonomy 1.0

Following the focus group, we prepared detailed notes that were emailed to the participants for their review and correction. We used the Focus Group notes together with the Document Survey to prepare the first version of the Taxonomy. The Taxonomy identified:

1. The Metadata attributes used by all Document Types in the Department,
2. The Document Types and metadata attributes for each Type,
3. Any controlled vocabularies associated with metadata attributes,
4. The proposed file naming convention based on concatenating metadata values into three file naming segments, 
5. At least one use case for each of the Document Types with the corresponding metadata that would fulfill each use case, and
6. The taxonomy to be used in the validation activity.

[Slide 11] The Discovery Report

Following the focus group, we also prepared a presentation that summarized our preliminary assessment of the Document Types and our proposed metadata scheme for describing them so that they could be retrieved in response to the identified use cases. This Discovery Report” was reviewed with the Department stakeholders in an online meeting. After the meeting, the stakeholders reviewed the report and provided corrections or approved it.

[Slide 12] The Validation Activity.

Based on the approved Department metadata scheme, an Optimal Workshop tree navigation exercise was configured for each use case. Once launched, the Department stakeholders had a week to complete the validation activity via a web link. [Demo TreeJack Validation Activity]

[Slide 13] The Validation Report

Then we prepared a validation report based on the Optimal Workshop self-scoring activity results, and made any changes to the taxonomy that were warranted. The Department would receive the Validation Report along with our final draft of the Taxonomy.

[Slide 14] The Specification

Finally, we prepared a full specification for how each Department Document Type should be described with complete and consistent metadata. A QR-code control sheet was generated for each document type that would trigger the appropriate metadata template, so that technicians could generate the relevant metadata during the document scanning process. The Specification also was designed to serve as a continuing specification, so that future scanning or born-digital documents could be appropriately tagged with the relevant metadata.

Project Demographics

[Slide 15, 16, 17]

The project ran for 2 years from October 2020-October 2022, throughout the Covid-19 pandemic. I personally ran most of the focus groups, masking up and taking transit, meeting in conference rooms at various facilities across the Authority’s area of coverage including in buildings in the train yards at the end of the rail lines. Laurinda, who often introduced herself to the clients as “Joseph’s Assistant,” supported me by coordinating activities of the metadata strategy, as well as providing her own thoughts and insight about the proposed taxonomies while they were being drafted, for each office.

[Slide 18]

The rest of the strategy team was from History Associates. National Office Systems (NOS) ran the scanning and tagging operation, and the change management vendor was The Clearing.

[Slide 19]

We completed metadata strategies for 63 Departments or business units from across the Authority. This included business functions ranging from Accounting and HR, to bus and rail operations, to the transit police and health and safety Departments. We completed an average of 2.6 Department metadata strategies per month. There was an average of 9.6 attributes per Department. The only mandatory attributes were Document Type and Business Unit for every Department. Aside from the mandatory attributes, the most common attributes were:

[Slide 20] Maps

We always started with the question – How do you organize your documents? The patterns emerged quickly and were reminiscent of the ideas of early information architects like Saul Wurman. For the Authority it was all about location, specifically the rail map. The location on a map turned out to be the defining construct which enabled access to the information in the documents.  And, it turns out, there are different maps—one for passengers and a multi-layered map that the Authority uses internally, for many operational purposes. [Demo Interactive Map]

[Slide 21] Summary

This presentation discussed what we learned about taxonomy while working on the railroad, and how we helped the Authority begin their digital transformation journey.