“Ownership is not a vice, not something to be ashamed of, but rather a commitment, and an instrument by which the general good can be served.” – Václav Havel

In my experience, when a business begins building a taxonomy program, two related questions arise: where does the taxonomy program live in an organization and who owns it?

There are at least two paths that lead to these questions. The first, and the most common from what I’ve seen, is that a taxonomy has arisen organically in the organization based on a real business need requiring a solution. An example of this might be the development of a marketing taxonomy used for planning or for tagging assets such as product copy or images. In this case, a part of the organization has covered a narrow domain of knowledge and there is a recognition that it needs to expand and grow to serve the greater needs of the business.

The second, and less common, is that an organization recognizes the importance of an enterprise taxonomy where none has existed before and makes a calculated decision to start one. From the scattered remains of glossaries and metadata schemas, consultants or a hired taxonomist builds a new enterprise taxonomy from the ground up and sets the foundation for a taxonomy program. Because an organization must requisition for a consulting budget and new positions, a decision must be made as to where this position will sit in the organization and to whom this individual, or taxonomy team, will report.

Who Should Not Own Enterprise Taxonomy

Let me start by saying who I think should not own the taxonomy. Although I myself have worked in taxonomy in a technical group, I would advise against ownership by any group called Information Technology (IT) or some similar variant. In fact, I would actually be surprised if anyone in a technical organization disagreed with this assessment. Technology exists to serve the needs of the business and it is the business who should define those needs and requirements. Even when a technology organization leads the business in best practices for tooling, the business needs to define how and in what capacity the technology supports business processes and activities. While technologists such as information architects may be adept at building metadata models and schemas, including taxonomies, it is the business who must decide what values those metadata models include.

Now that I have stated the business should own the taxonomy, I’ll now go further and say that no one business domain within the organization should be the owner. Marketing should not dictate enterprise taxonomy needs, but should own marketing taxonomy needs. The same goes for any other specific domain within an organization, as any functioning company will be made up of multiple domains all working together to achieve common goals.

Where Does Taxonomy Live?

Following on the idea that no one business domain should own the enterprise taxonomy, so too should the taxonomy not live in a technology solution supporting one part of the business. While digital asset management (DAM) systems absolutely require metadata, the use case of applying taxonomy to describe assets is too narrow to act as a centralized repository for other business needs. Similarly, content management systems (CMS) are not the best place to store data that could also be described by taxonomy metadata. Using the business glossaries in data catalogs is valuable for describing the data living in or passing through that system, but is not the right tool to house business terms which should be applied in other repositories or, again, in a separate CMS. While any of these systems can house a taxonomy, none of them is purpose-built to provide enterprise taxonomy services.

As a former taxonomy and ontology management (TMS) software product manager, there is truth in the positioning of these tools as centralized, agnostic, metadata repositories for many (but maybe not all) enterprise use cases. Centralizing taxonomies in a tool allows for building enterprise taxonomies that can serve multiple use cases and multiple systems. Because the tool stands alone, it is less subject to changing business directions and domain imperatives. On the flip side, making the case for purchasing a standalone system that “only” houses taxonomies and ontologies can be challenging. I have written about this in my former position in a blog called Running a Successful Taxonomy Campaign.

So, Who Owns the Taxonomy?

An independent, centralized, enterprise taxonomy team should ultimately own the enterprise taxonomy and the TMS it lives in. The taxonomy team owns the taxonomy and ontology models they build, but what they build is always in the service of use cases defined by the business. Having a centralized team allows them to be in a position in which they can serve any and all business domains and work with technology groups to fulfill use cases in enterprise and domain-specific technologies. I’ve seen taxonomy teams reporting up to enterprise knowledge management or learning organizations which serve the same enterprise-wide function.

Some of the business use cases are truly enterprise while others may be for specific domains which in turn serve the enterprise. For example, values from the taxonomy used in navigation and search typeahead on the company’s website is where the taxonomy ROI is realized. Tagging product images and copy in a DAM serving the front end are also enterprise. The metadata from the taxonomies is used on assets which are likely going to live in multiple downstream systems and channels in which products are presented and sold.

Other use cases may be specific to a domain requiring metadata values which may or may not be shared with other domains and systems. However, centralizing these values also supports interoperability and business continuity should the domain decide to switch technology platforms. Rather than migrate metadata from the old to new system, the metadata can still be pulled from a centralized taxonomy management system using common GUIDs used across the enterprise.

The real key here is finding the owners within the business who will be accountable for the concept values, properties, and relationships needing to be maintained in the taxonomy. Taxonomists are usually generalists who can build and maintain taxonomies across a variety of domains. They are taxonomy subject matter experts, not domain subject experts (though they may become so over time). In this way, the business SMEs who know the subject matter can be accountable for adding new concepts and identifying concepts which need to be deprecated over time. The business owners are essential to the ongoing governance and sustainability of the taxonomy and, of course, are the people who know the business needs the best.

The working relationship with technology groups is the same. There are product managers owning technology platforms serving the business. Each of these tools can be integrated via APIs to a centralized TMS to consume all or part of the taxonomy and ontology graph for the appropriate use case.

A standalone, independent, enterprise taxonomy program will allow for service to any and all business domains without bias…except for those shared business goals at the enterprise level. The ability for all business domains to have ownership and stake in the shared enterprise taxonomies also allows for cross-team collaboration and innovation with shared metadata use.