(highlight:: To create a great taxonomy, you must know your audience and their goals
Summary:
Creating a taxonomy is challenging without knowing the target audience and their goals, such as frequency of updates and changes.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
It's really difficult to create a taxonomy if you don't know who the audiences. They're, you know, they really need to be targeted towards end use cases and with a good understanding of what those people's goals are. What they need to do, how often they're going to get updated and change and stuff like that.)
- Time 0:03:38
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(highlight:: An Organizations Information Layer Lives Between Its Tech and Experience Layers
Summary:
Gary and I discovered that every organization has an information layer, connecting the technical layer (technology, software, and data) with the experience layer (screens and surfaces for users).
This connection has become our main focus.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
I think what Gary and I started to realize as we did more and more of this work is that every organization has what we call an information layer. And that is, as we have come to describe it the layer that is between what we call the technical layer, which is all the technology and the software and the data that underlies, you know, A product or a service or an organization's offering. And the experience layer, which is all the screens and surfaces that actual users of whatever the product or service or offering is incorrect with directly. And tying those things together has become factors principle line of business.)
- Time 0:07:41
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(highlight:: Building an Organizational Information Layer to Provide Consistent Experiences To Users
Summary:
An orchestrated approach to managing information is crucial for organizations.
This includes defining product models and geography terms. By creating a centralized information layer accessible to all systems, organizations can improve their digital capacity.
By connecting systems at a semantic level, mapping tables can be avoided, and consistent information can be provided to users for analytics, personalization, and website experiences.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
There's also a coherent orchestrated approach to managing those definitions or that, you know, really the creation of that information layer. What is the organizational perspective on the product model. What is the definitive set of geography terms for our organization. What countries do we do business in which ones do we not. And so, being able to model that outside of any individual system, where they're able to create this, and then have it be available to all the systems that needed almost as a service. And that's where we found the organization been able to make a big step forward in the digital capacity. And so, by being able to stitch these systems together at least at that semantic level so that they don't have to do mapping tables between all these systems and that they can say that, You know, this is a this and this exists in these five different systems across these business units. So we're doing analytics or providing personalization, or providing, you know, new experiences on our website. We all know how to get that information and we can provide that consistent information across the experience to our users.)
- Time 0:09:17
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(highlight:: The Importance of an Information Layer in Maintaining Consistency Across Business Systems
Summary:
Without an independently managed set of concepts to link things together, e-commerce companies face challenges.
They struggle with merging taxonomies onto navigation, hindering non-product marketing. To succeed, businesses must tie product content to the products and understand their customers' interests.
Core capabilities like merchandising, content management, and customer management live in separate systems.
The information layer allows businesses to align their terminology and describe information consistently across systems.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
If you don't have an independently managed set of concepts to be able to link those two things together, you're going to run into challenges and this is just about every e-commerce company We've ever worked with has had this challenge. So, you're going to cut and paste their merge taxonomy onto their navigation and things with sideways and they couldn't do any kind of non product marketing of their products in a digital Environment, because they couldn't tie the product content to the products themselves. And also throw on what you know about each of your customers and how you have those same concepts reflected in your CR and your customer relationship management software so you know What things they might be interested in. So as you go down this path, there's more and more core business capabilities merchandising your content management, your customer management. And all of those things, generally live in different systems and if you're going to stitch start stitching that content together across those, you want to make sure they're describing Things the same way as much as possible. And that's what the information layer allows you to do it was say, this is what's important to us. And we're going to use these terms these concepts to describe our information across all of these systems.)
- Time 0:14:29
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(highlight:: The Information Layer Requires Governance
Summary:
The first step is aligning systems and keeping it simple.
As capabilities increase, more complexity can be added. Governance is crucial, considering organizational capacity, technology capabilities, and updating terms.
Maintenance and governance are essential for the models we create.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
So the first step in this is just getting this alignment across the systems and that way you want to have it. You need to be as simple as possible. Then once you want to build on additional capabilities and you've got that level of maturity. So that you can create these concepts and govern and manage them across these systems. Then you're able to add additional complexity to your models themselves. And that, that idea of governance is a really important one because when we're working on our projects. One of the biggest inputs is what does what organizational, what's the organization capacity for managing these structures. Do they have the technology capabilities and how to propagate these terms these concepts across the systems. Are they able to keep them up to date. Is there marketing team, discipline enough to be able to give people heads up in which direction things are going to be going six months from now so that they can. Reify those concepts into the models ahead of time. So that's the understanding that governance processes and maintenance needs is a huge part of the models that we create.)
- Time 0:16:40
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(highlight:: The Information Layer Establishing the Semantic Meaning of Concepts Across Systems
Summary:
In a complex marketing organization, different people have different definitions of what a campaign is, causing communication issues.
The information layer aims to provide a common understanding of these concepts, enabling effective collaboration and analytics.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
You can ask seven different people. Okay, you work in one of the most legendary marketing organizations in history of mass marketing. Tell me what a campaign is. You might get seven different answers, and then you might talk to somebody who scratches their head and says, wow, I work with campaigns all the time. And I can kind of tell you what I think a campaign is, but we don't have a common definition of campaign in this organization that we all and faithfully articulate. And that causes a problem when you're in a complex technical environment, and all marketing organizations at that scale are in a complex technical environment. They have all of these systems, and they have all these processes, and different functions and different groups that need to share information about these fundamental concepts. And that's what the information layer really refers to, it's that abstract notion of, and I'll use the word semantic, you know, it's what do these things actually mean. And then, out of their definitions get instantiated into this complex digital environment.
Speaker 2
Yeah, and obviously if if group A over here has one understanding of campaign, and group B over here has a different understanding of campaign it's going to make communicating between The teams difficult right.
Speaker 1
And it made doing analytics on their marketing campaigns, almost impossible.)
- Time 0:19:53
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(highlight:: The Evolution Towards Treating Concepts and Information as an Organizational Asset
Summary:
The history of organizations and digital transformation shows the importance of tying together information and experiences.
In the early days of the web, organizations adopted content management systems for dynamic content. Then, they invested in complex systems like CRM, DAM, and PIM.
However, the rise of smartphones and social media changed the game, making information-rich experiences the focus.
Now, organizations are realizing the need to unify these diverse systems and create coherent and seamless experiences.
The information layer should be seen as an independent asset that requires careful management across the organization.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
I think it's also really important to remember that the reason that the information layer is independent is because the let me tell you the history of how we sort of came to think about Organizations is having information layer. In the dawn of the, you know, of the contemporary web or internet, which really started in about 1998. The goal that's when content management systems really started to become widely adopted because organizations quickly realized that they needed to manage this dynamic and, and They couldn't, you know, be building individual pages for everything. And then for the next really 10 years I think the organization spent a lot of time and energy and money on, on the first wave of digital transformation and the other thing that we're going To do is let's implement a CRM let's implement a dam let's implement a PIM let's implement, you know, enterprise search let's implement all of these vast complex expensive systems. And then after the end of that decade and they realized that, oh, now we just have proliferating notions of everything and all these different systems. And the world changed in 2008 smartphones became a mass consumer product and social media started to make the decision users of information and users of digital experiences to expect Information rich information dense experiences so for the next 10 years, the experience layer was the focus. And I'm sure Jorge you remember what it was like in 2008 when the smartphone and direct manipulation and surfaces became mass widely adopted that it felt like waking up. Oh, where is the world been all of our careers were suddenly in the center of the universe as, as, you know, human centered experience designers and interaction designers. And what we think has happened now and maybe been accelerated a little bit by the pandemic is that organizations have come to realize as digital transformation has become even more As a mandate that they really need to tie all of this stuff together and they don't just need to tie systems together, they need to tie experiences together. And so we have experiences that are coherent and seamless, and that represent the same notions and concepts and an object and things across a really complex firmament. So the notion of the information layers that you need to think about that as an independent corporate or organizational asset I don't like saying corporate because every organization Whether it's a business or not faces this, you need to think of that as an organizational asset and focus on really defining all of those concepts and managing those assets as assets Themselves, instead of just as things that live in a system or in a business unit or in an experience.)
- Time 0:25:25
- information systems, experience design, data integration, information layer, organizational assets,

(highlight:: The Importance of Defining Concepts for Organizational Alignment
Summary:
Understanding the concepts of product and campaign is essential for taking action.
Defining what a product is allows for its implementation across various platforms, processes, and systems. The information layer addresses the core issue of clarifying the organization's identity and offerings.
In the complex digital landscape, organizations often realize their previous approaches don't align with their fundamental understanding of products.
This necessitates a deep thinking and ownership of concepts to effectively define their offerings.
Transcript:
Speaker 1
If you don't know what a product is or if you don't know what a campaign is, you can't do anything. You can do a lot of work and you can be really busy, but fundamentally, you know, what you define a product, what a product is, then you can have a product model or a product hierarchy. Then you can start implementing that notion of product in all of the different places where it needs to exist, all the experiences, all of the processes, all of the governance regimes And all of the systems. And it's really the information layer is addressing the kernel of that problem of what are the things. Who are we and what are we offering. And once we start diving into that suddenly organization to realize, wow, we haven't really thought about this in any way that is going to work in a complex digital environment. This is all evolved organically. We acquired this company and brought in a bunch of their notions of what a product is, or we implemented this system. And the just the architecture of that system itself forced us to change the, you know, what we thought of as a product, but that doesn't really align with with the notion of product hood That, you know, is fundamental to who we are. So, all of these things force organizations to really think deeply about defining concepts and owning the concepts that they that are fundamental to their, their offering essentially.)
- Time 0:33:27
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