Hiran Salvi

Taxonomy defines the structure that underpins Knowledge Management, Document Management, Records Management and more. Considerable effort goes into defining & developing taxonomy, with the goal of creating a common structure that will benefit the whole organization. The challenge, however, is to ensure that taxonomy work well for staff, beyond any organizational benefits that are sought. If not designed well, taxonomy can become 'white elephants', too hard to understand and too complex to use. At their worst, poorly designed taxonomy is the direct causes of project and system failure. Information architecture has much to offer those creating taxonomy, including a range of structured techniques for building and testing their effectiveness.

I've heard some developers arguing that SharePoint is a threat to their job security because it allows end-users to do things that previously only they had the "power" to do. Look at how easy it is to provision new sites from a top-level site. WSS handles all of the underlying IIS interaction for you. And when you look at what users can do with the BDC (Business Data Catalog), I can understand why many developers shudder.