Business value of tags

I had an interesting conversation with a client today about using tags to understand their business functions and process.

Over the past few months we've helped them create a corporate directory application that lets people tag their skills and responsibilities (this is the same the tag tagging application I mentioned a few weeks ago). These tags can be connected to a fairly detailed org chart, which means that an individual's tags can bubble-up to their business unit, department, division, and so on up the hierarchy.

This organization is working on several information management initiatives--including things like building taxonomies and understanding how business processes related to IM processes. The tag set provides a useful starting point for these kinds of projects because individual tags from the directory can be rolled-up into a hierarchical view of business functions. Attached to those rolled-up tags could be descriptions, frequency of use and churn data, how broadly they appear (spread across the organization or limited to one business area), and other data that is easily derived from the existing application.

That information can be used to kick-start a number of interesting conversations about how an organization works, from how skills are deployed to whether there's a shared understanding of business functions. Information management, knowledge management and human resources are the three obvious places where this kind of data would be valuable--I'm sure there are lots of other potential uses. And the data itself--the combination of user tags tied to detailed org chart--will be pretty rich once the system is completely rolled out, and remarkably cheap.

Getting back to the tags themselves, I think they have two unintended, but positive, uses in this application: they act as a front-line perspective on business functions, and they illustrate the gaps between the management and line understanding of the business. I think understanding those gaps is at least theoretically valuable, and I'll try to write more about its value in practice. (Client permitting and all that stuff--you know the drill.)