Pluto - A Failed Taxonomy

Don't understand what a taxonomy is? Think of Pluto...Planets used to be pretty easy to understand--they were round, orbited the sun, and were nine in number. Then a group of "smarty pants" astronomers decided that Pluto was no longer a planet, and everything changed! The astronomers also claimed to be able to see a couple of hundred invisible planets around other stars. Frankly, I began to suspect that alcohol was involved.

What on Earth (or Pluto for that matter), had happened? The answer is both simple and disturbing: astronomy outgrew its taxonomy.

The old taxonomy defined a planet as being one of nine big round objects orbiting our sun. Our astronomical knowledge has now grown to the point where many of the definitions in our old taxonomy no longer fit our understanding. We discarded the old astronomical taxonomy the way a child discards an outgrown pair of sneakers. Like a growing child, the astronomy community needed something new that would fit its new level of maturity. So, our new taxonomy goes something like this, a planet is an object which:

1. Orbits its solar system's "Primary": (Note that the new taxonomy is no longer content to call the center of a solar system a star--there are now too many deviations from the old definition to keep it)
2. Has a mass that exceeds the total of all other masses in its Orbital Zone: (This, by the way, is where Pluto got kicked out of the 'planet club.')
3. Is, more or less, round in shape

Pluto ran into trouble with point number two, above. It doesn't "own" its Orbital Zone. The Earth, as an example, weighs about 1.7 million times more than the total of other masses in its Orbital Zone. Pluto is 0.07 as massive as the total of other masses in its Orbital Zone. Pluto just doesn't measure up to our current definition, and many objects that were heretofore unknown do measure up to our new definition.

So what does this example tell us about taxonomies? A taxonomy is a system of definitions that are used to describe, categorize, recognize, organize and manage information. Because a taxonomy represents an organization's world view, it can be very painful and difficult to change a taxonomy, as is seen with the emotional turmoil caused by the Pluto debate.

Governance is the process of maintaining the taxonomy and its supporting policies.

Organizations of all kinds have taxonomies, whether they've written them down or not. And organizations outgrow their taxonomies as well. This usually happens because of mergers, increase or decrease in sales volumes, the introduction of disruptive technologies, and changes in markets or regulatory constraints. It can be just as painful for an organization or corporation to change its taxonomy as it was for the astronomers.

When two organizations merge, the "winner" is often the one whose taxonomy dominates the new organization. Never underestimate the power of words on daily life. Sometimes, when organizations merge and the taxonomies are not reconciled, it is possible to have vice presidents reporting to managers who report to directors who report to vice presidents, and so on. What happened? There was a collision of taxonomies. People from the "old school" cling to their obsolete taxonomies in an effort to retain their position, influence, and effectiveness.

Twenty years ago I was hired by a major hard drive manufacturer to help them figure out what was wrong with their engineers. The engineers were unhappy and political infighting was rampant. Leadership asked me to find out why. I interviewed many engineers for two or three weeks and arrived at an astonishing conclusion. The problem was that this global, multi-cultural organization didn't speak a common technical language. Words like "defect" in the U.S. did not have the same meaning as they did in places like Malaysia and Ireland. Slightly different definitions led to different data structures and metrics. So, even though the entire company spoke English at work, the business culture and terminology was very different in each plant. This led to continual misunderstanding, misinterpretation, and the creation of useless or incompatible data. The brilliant engineers at this corporation spent all of their time "spinning their wheels" trying to find "usable data."

Back then I didn't know about the concept of taxonomies, so we worked together to create what I called a "Common Data Architecture." This was a system for defining terms, roles, metrics, artifacts and processes and implementing them corporation-wide. Since language must be controlled but agile, the real breakthrough came when we created a small committee with representation from a wide variety of organizations and countries. It was their job to validate any proposed term and enter it into a common reference database.

Collaboration tools, like SharePoint, again beg the question of taxonomies and definitions. In order to collaborate effectively, people have to communicate effectively. This means that they have to have a shared understanding of terms and the relationships between terms. And with the explosion of collaboration data that results, they need automated tools to organize, classify, categorize, protect, and manage the information. SharePoint is designed to do both: normalize communication and manage the volume of information that results.SharePoint builds metadata definitions of an organizations data so that it can organize, index, search, and manage that data automatically. However, in keeping with the eternal principles of information technology, "Garbage In causes Garbage Out."

If your organization has a fractured, disorganized, unreconciled taxonomy of terms, values, roles, processes, products, and documents, then it will yield a hopelessly confused and disorganized SharePoint implementation.So step 1 in planning an effective, agile and supportable SharePoint implementation is to:

1. Define requirements
2. Define the resulting taxonomies
3. Establish a Governance Process to provide ongoing oversight, organization and support for the resulting information.

If you would like to find out more, please email me at Mark@VitalSkill.com