Correspondence: Seth Earley, Principal, Earley & Associates, P O Box 308, Concord, MA 01742, USA. Tel: 781 444 0287 E-mail: seth@earley.com

¹is a recognized thought leader in the areas of content management, digital asset management, search, taxonomy and metadata. He has been implementing content management and knowledge management projects for over 14 years and has been in the technology field for 20+ years. He hosts a series of conference calls and forums on search, content strategy and digital, is founder of the Boston Knowledge Management Forum and co-author of Practical Knowledge Management from the IBM Press. He is a former adjunct professor at Northeastern University, where he taught graduate courses in E Business Strategy. Seth has developed search, content and knowledge strategies for global organizations and has developed underlying taxonomies for a diverse roster of Fortune 1000 companies. He is a popular speaker and workshop leader at conferences throughout North America, speaking on intranet design, knowledge management, content management systems and strategy, taxonomy development and other related topics.

Abstract

Managing content — whether documents, transactional data or digital assets — is about providing content in context. Users can't find what they need for three reasons:
(1) It's the nature of the beast — information and systems evolve and tend toward a disordered state. We need to expend energy to clean things up and organize them from time to time.
(2) In most organizations governance processes around content management , digital asset management, search, taxonomy and metadata are immature. Therefore, there is no clear ownership of content and repositories.
(3) Content is not "selectively managed," that is, little consideration is given to the continuum of content value. People lump collaborative workspaces (which are messy and chaotic) into the same problem as document and content management (which should be a more orderly process around capturing and reusing high value finished content). These are two ends of the spectrum.

In this interview we discuss a number of issues around content management, taxonomy, tagging, metadata and search, and provide some ideas on how to tackle the chaos to create business value.