The Wyndham Hotels Taxonomy project began with a basic vision: anyone with access to their assets should be able to find their assets. To that end they hired TCS to create a universal taxonomy to organize their work.
My role was to create a flexible system for tag management in their varying DAMs. Over ten weeks, I:
- Collected and analyzed their asset tags and structures in Adobe Experience Manager
- Identified duplicate tags, overlapping topics, and redundant structures
- Invented a 4-level hierarchy with top-level category keywords in two groups (Primary and Support)
- Wrote governance guidelines and steps for creating new tags, archiving old tags, merging tags, and splitting tags
The first part of any audit is to question the data. In this case, I discovered that many of the tags were redundant. Knowing this simplified the project, reducing 2,540 known tags to about 900.
I invented a new set of categories, or “namespaces” in AEM parlance, based on existing groups and industry terminology.
While working with the data, I realized that there were two super-groups lurking among the tags. A subset of technical, media, UX/UI, and system-related tags didn’t fit with the expected hospitality tags. From these I implied a “support” group.
Working with the client, I soon realized that they preferred high-level views of progress, although I occasionally gave them practical examples with actual content.
The final hand-off included instructions for governing the tags, including:
- Determining if a new tag would overlap before creating it
- How to decide when an existing tag should split into several for better search precision
- Managing temporary tags in a dedicated “ad hoc” namespace
- When to create new categories
- Criteria for merging tags
- How often teams should meet to review their assets and organization
Knowing the guidelines needed to reach as many people as possible, I wrote them in a simple Word file with headings and a table of contents. Distributable, editable, readable, and universal, this format was the most widely accepted I could determine among stakeholders.