Great article by Seth Earley that lays out why taxonomy is fundamental to helping businesses come to grips with the complexity of the modern technological and social environment. Basically, his argument is that taxonomies can define the core elements of the business and give everyone a common language to work from, whereas defining data structures before defining taxonomy can fail to address the underlying structure of a business. Taxonomy gives businesses “conceptual building blocks” to develop adaptable and sustainable systems and processes.

I spent some time following Zach Holmquist’s lead this morning:

That was all I needed to have the lightbulb go off, and to motivate me to finally cleanup my TextExpander Snippets. No more ;; or ,, confusion. All I had to do was simply split groups of snippets into period separated by objects and functions.

Having a system makes easy work of repetitive tasks, and having a taxonomy makes large amounts of information easier to work with. Setting up systems and taxonomies can be daunting, especially because good organization schemes often don’t reveal themselves until a certain critical mass of objects have been developed, at which point it often feels easier to just go with the ad hoc taxonomy that you started with. But it’s worth spending some time to get your system in order. The productivity pay-off can be huge.