A-Z Is Not As Easy As A-Z.
In which I learn a lesson about functional bias while sorting content.
This week I’ve been working on building out a client’s taxonomy map. It’s always an interesting exercise consolidating, categorizing, and cataloging the internal language that a company creates.
This particular client maintains a list of a specific set of companies they do business with. Each department also has their own specific data points about each of the companies listed. To ensure that I was covering all possible combinations I asked different functional teams for an alphabetized copy of their list.
What struck me was the differences in those lists that had all been sorted using the same common A-Z methodology.
Depending on the functional group that prepared the list the sort process had been predicated on different information:
The customer facing teams used the common short names for the companies.
The technology groups used the system coded user IDs.
The legal and finance teams used the full legal trading name of the companies.
Some groups included the definite article in a company name, others didn’t.
It was apparent that each group had brought their own inherent functionally-based bias to the apparent simple task of doing an alphabetical sort of a list of names.
A reminder that I too had made an assumption that asking for something to be done in what I felt was a particular easily understood way would result in uniform results.
It was also a reminder that from a content perspective the context in which it is consumed is as equally important as the content itself.
Alan
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Weekly Thought
At every point of interaction the customer perceives you, your employees, representatives, and partners as the subject-matter experts helping them meet their particular needs at that point in their journey.
Content Discovery Workshops - Now taking bookings for Q3/24
THE CONTENT POOL is offering a special discount on our two-day Content Discovery Workshops for newsletter subscribers and readers.
We are now taking bookings for Q3/24, and we wanted to make sure that as a newsletter reader you got an early opportunity to lock-in a date.
As a reminder during these on-site in-person workshops workshop we will:
Develop your content vision
Identify opportunities to leverage your content in new ways
Map out the path to transform your enterprise content.
It will be followed by two deliverables:
Key observations document
High-level content transformation plan
A quick overview of the standard workshop format can be found at https://the-content-pool.com/workshops/
If you would like more details, or you like to discuss reserving a date for yourself and your team to benefit from a Content Discovery workshop, just email us at info@4jsgroup.com
In The Bookstore
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Till next time - have fun paddling in The Content Pool.
Alan J. Porter
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