Executive Summary (This is a document excerpt)

Taxonomy is the longest "four-letter" word in the English language to most information and knowledge management professionals — especially those who find themselves in charge of a corporate taxonomy project. Many enterprises view taxonomy projects with the same ill-repute they viewed early "knowledge management" projects — as time consuming, costly, resource-intensive, highly political, and purely administrative overhead — offering ill-defined, unquantifiable future benefits. Everyone likes to throw the t-word around, but what do you do if you're suddenly asked to create, build, and own a taxonomy? To get started, agree upon how the taxonomy will be used, and then follow some simple but powerful guidelines for categorizing the information "buckets."