Taxonomy, Metadata, and Sustainability Initiatives
Every day, your team spends precious time hunting for information that should be at their fingertips.
Searching through email threads for project details
Recreating work that already exists somewhere
Asking the same questions over and over
Making decisions without complete information
This isn't just frustrating—it's expensive. According to a study published in the IDC White Paper The High Cost of Not Finding Information, employees “spend at least 15 to 25 percent of the workday searching for information. Only half the searches are successful.” Poor taxonomy design is cited as the root of the problem.
For a 10-person team, that's 20 hours of lost productivity every single day.
These issues compound the bigger your team gets. The more you grow, the more information (reports, white papers, spreadsheets, presentations, budgets, etc.) you produce. And more people means more tendency toward silos.
Now imagine you are working towards B Corps status (or any kind of sustainability certification). A ton of information is required for the application process, and if you don’t have it all to hand, your chances of success are severely diminished. Either you will spend unnecessary time recreating documents that already exist somewhere, or you will have to submit your application without pertinent information. And if some of it lives with your supply chain people, some with your budget people, and some with your HR people… Is it all available to the team actually putting together the application? I mentioned silos above. There is evidence that silos are one of the top four challenges to ESG reporting.*
A professional information manager can provide metadata (aka tagging) and build a taxonomy to ensure all your information is available when it is needed, by the people who need it. Beyond these services, we can create procedures and standards so that your team can easily and seamlessly add metadata to new documents so they don’t end up hidden. Or, if you prefer, we can provide contracted services to continually update your metadata and taxonomy to ensure that any new documents your team creates are fully accessible. Contact Entrelac today so we can discuss your needs and craft a solution.
On a side note, I point you to this insightful take on why silos are not necessarily a bad thing. It got me thinking about silos with carefully constructed communication networks running between them. Or something like that. I don’t have a mind-blowing metaphor, but you get the idea. Go read it!
