Striking the balance: a distributed taxonomy & governance model for university communications

Challenge

Information overload is real, and email glut is a major contributor. To help employees more easily find relevant news and announcements, UCSF’s communications team was rolling out a hub to syndicate content from different departments’ websites.

Each department was naturally “the center of their own worlds”, rightly focused on creating specific content for their own audiences – from continuing dental education credits for clinical or research faculty, to campus volunteer opportunities for all staff or even students. Consequently, content on the same subject was categorized differently (or not at all!) and there was a lack of shared structure and processes preventing content aggregation and syndication by topic, type or audience.

Approach

DISCOVERY

To get a handle on the existing environment, we reviewed the content and structure of existing sites prioritized for the hub and surveyed selected site owners to understand current taxonomy use. We also facilitated workshops with the core team, representing communications, user experience and IT, to educate as well as to elicit needs and opportunities. After presenting a range of solutions, along with their pros and cons, we ultimately landed on a strategic framework to guide holistic taxonomy development, governance and implementation.

TAXONOMY DEVELOPMENT

Working from the existing concepts analyzed during discovery and the communications goals of the hub, we focused on creating mutually exclusive top level topic categories and updating second level terms to be unambiguous and aligned with UCSF’s existing style guide.

As many teams lacked dedicated resources to work on taxonomy, the goal was to provide ‘ready-to-use’ taxonomies (‘taxonomy-as-a-service’) that could be maintained centrally. For those teams with specific content description needs, such as HR or the School of Dentistry, we worked closely with their subject matter experts to develop specific branches of the taxonomy for which they would ultimately be responsible. This ‘hub & spoke’ approach was meant to provide both flexibility and efficiency for using and managing the taxonomy.

GOVERNANCE PILOT

While developing the taxonomy approach, we identified three governance models that could accommodate the ‘hub & spoke’ structure of the taxonomy, with varying levels of investment on the part of both central communications and individual departments.

We conducted pilots with both the HR and School of Dentistry ‘spoke’ teams to understand which model would work best, taking into account resources, the rate of change and overall effort versus investment. The retained model of shared governance specified a feedback loop and guidelines to ensure that ‘spoke’ departments could easily propose new terms for core taxonomies managed by the central ‘hub’ team. For those specific subject matter facets such as human resources, the model was flipped and the ‘spoke’ department maintained responsibility for processing change requests and pushing them directly to their taxonomy branch.

Solution

We partnered with UCSF to develop a taxonomy framework and governance model to syndicate news and announcements from across the organization to a central portal, relying on shared topic and audience taxonomies so that users could quickly view and filter content relevant to them. The distinct ‘hub & spoke’ model for taxonomy use and evolution ensures that the central communications team can easily manage updates while delegating responsibility for domain-knowledge terms to subject matter experts.

Wins:

Simplified and harmonized key vocabularies to kick-start syndication of content to the communications portal
Delivered a ‘taxonomy-as-a-service’ approach to help small teams reuse existing vocabularies without requiring a significant investment
Empowered domain knowledge experts to manage specific branches of the taxonomy while adhering to shared guidelines and standards
Defined future roadmap including support for mappings and more advanced relationships between taxonomy terms (e.g. relating topics to audiences)