[Sigkm-l] content audits and taxonomies

[Mark A Montgomery]

I do not believe that one can cleanly separate technology from metrics,
indeed I am quite confident that with on-line systems it is a mistake to
try, normally done so by folks who lack a full understanding of the
technology. That's because the technology will directly impact your
ability to query, extract, and analyze information from those your
mission intends to serve.

That said, I fully understand your intent Hollis and have explored the
topic enough to know that it can be reduced to a mathematical formula,
but only IF the organization can first provide numerical values to
portions of their mission. It's still a human jury type of judgement,
just using binary values for convenience.

For example, a good place to start- 

- What percentage of the knowledge center's mission was to inform the
public on which topics? (in this case the answer must be taken from
surveying the public. Not perfect but little is....)

- What percentage of the k-center's mission was to empower the internal
organization to make better decisions in a more timely manner? While this
can take some digging, it's easier than most people think, I've done it.
In addition to data mining and follow up surveys, another method is to
perform a test period where you ask a sample to track and rate
information that was provided. 

For example, a really strong editorial, white paper or research report
might have been made available to the k-center and then recommended to a
COP (hopefully the k-center performs filtering and relevant referrals).
Sometimes it's really easy to attribute the influence an individual piece
of work had, and the ensuing follow up of the organization to specific
decisions, policy changes, etc., actions that then are often reviewed for
ROI (or value) anyway. 

The technology does matter, even if just to count unique visits to that
report from .executiveoffice or .r&d.headquarters.org or if on the public
server .newsweek.com. You can then use business intelligence type tools
to develop reports of who and how many are linking to the site and what's
being said about it. 

However, you can take it much farther than that, even to the point of
making it mandatory for certain groups to rate the value of the
particular service to their efforts, and that can ONLY be done well with
tech tools.

For financial ROI, it's then necessary to place financial values on the
applicable areas, which in some cases will be easy to prove while in
others management will simply have to guess. The process itself is
important and provides far more confidence/assurance because it's based
on relevance to the specific mission of the org.

The key is in using metrics and tools that are unbiased and tailored
specifically to the mission of the k-center & the org. The problem with
most in valuing such an investment is that they didn't have a clear
mission to begin with, and/or the design did not include metrics for
tracking ROI/value. It's safe to say that almost no one did it right the
first time btw.

Kind regards,

Mark Montgomery
Founder
KYield

On Fri, 12 Apr 2002 13:05:33 -0500 "Landrum, Hollis T ERDC-ITL-MS"
<Hollis.T.Landrum at erdc.usace.army.mil> writes:
> I am looking for resources related to performing content audits and 
> creating
> taxonomies for online knowledge centers
> or portals.  I am also interested in finding how corporations or
> organizations are measuring "success" of online
> knowledge centers, specifically what metrics are being used and how 
> are they
> being gathered.  I am not interested in
> the technology so much as the methodology being applied to 
> identifying,
> categorizing and managing content.  This is for
> the purpose of developing an online knowledge center within the 
> organization
> where I work.  Thanks.
> 
> Dr. Hollis Landrum
> Information Technology Specialist
> U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center


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