In our last episode before we take an end of year break, we had the pleasure of talking with taxonomy consultant Helen Lippell, editor of the book Taxonomies and programme chair of the Taxonomy Boot Camp. We talked about the value of semantic work, the cost-effectiveness of keeping a taxonomy fed and watered, and, of course, how well these tools support the use of AI.

Somehow we collectively hallucinated the existence of "Canada Airlines" - and in the context of discussing the relative accuracy of people and technologies! Perfect. With your hosts:

• Karl Melrose
• Judi Vernau
• Michael Upton

What does it take to bring together a library of your organisation's valued information? Alison Jones tells her story with a focus on her current role at Atlassian.

Go back to episode 43 to hear the conversation sparked by Alison's LinkedIn posts, which Karl refers to in this episode.

With your hosts:

• Karl Melrose
• Judi Vernau
• Michael Upton

Welcome back to our guest Adrian Kearns! We thought last episode was fruitful enough that we should go another round. Testable strategy, learning how to influence, and more.

A couple of bonus blog posts from Adrian you should definitely read:

How to influence at work: https://morphological.wordpress.com/2024/11/21/how-to-influence-at-work/

Four traps experienced solution architects fall into and how to mitigate them: https://morphological.wordpress.com/2021/01/27/four-traps-experienced-solution-architects-fall-into-and-how-to-mitigate-them/

With your hosts:

• Karl Melrose
• Judi Vernau
• Michael Upton

As part of an occasional series trying to join some dots between information management, information architecture, and other professions, we invited Adrian Kearns to come in and talk about what he does, the kinds of problems architects try and solve, and some of the ways he tries to go about it.

While Michael battles with a touch of the laggy video, we have some good discussion about throwing technology at something that isn't a technology problem, the good ol' Five Whys technique, loose coupling, and more!

With your hosts:

• Karl Melrose
• Judi Vernau
• Michael Upton

A free-ranging* conversation about the value of establishing a library or knowledge base of authoritative information than people want to access and can trust!

We touch on everything from shifting the focus of our practice towards getting people the right info, through Conway's Law and the DMBOK, to the persistent value of knowing what problems we're even trying to solve.

With your hosts:

• Karl Melrose
• Judi Vernau
• Michael Upton

* No, that's not a euphemism for completely without focus!

If we've got a thousand records to manage, what do we do? How about a million? How about a billion? We talk about the problem that records and information management practices don't seem to change in the face of scale, some of the implications of that, and what we might try.

With your hosts:

• Karl Melrose
• Judi Vernau
• Michael Upton

This episode Michael share three things he wishes he'd known sooner about how information is structured in Microsoft 365, compared to in an EDRMS:

• Microsoft 365 Groups change the way you manage access;
• there is no folder structure, a site just sits there on its own; and
• using content types are key to managing metadata when there's almost no inheritance.

Some links to learn more:

• A surprisingly good visual of all the things connected to a Microsoft 365 Group: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/office-365-groups
• Thinking about sites as standalone things, these pages might be helpful: "Guiding principle: the world is flat" https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/information-architecture-modern-experience
• Introducing content types: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/introduction-to-content-types-and-content-type-publishing-e1277a2e-a1e8-4473-9126-91a0647766e5

With your hosts:

• Karl Melrose
• Judi Vernau
• Michael Upton

Episode 40! Wow! Thank you to all who have been listening. For this one, we're back on the people stuff, thinking about when folks at work won't stick to the script.

A couple of things that come up:

• Fundamental Attribution Bias https://www.simplypsychology.org/fundamental-attribution.html
• Five Whys https://www.masterclass.com/articles/how-to-use-the-5-whys-technique-for-a-root-cause-analysis

With your hosts:

• Karl Melrose
• Judi Vernau
• Michael Upton