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Articles by Tom Reamy
Facets are most often used for objects, while taxonomies are used for topics or subjects found in documents. As we shall see, this difference is changing, but it explains why facets have been mostly associated with ecommerce sites rather than within the enterprise where finding documents is the dominant interaction.
The initial reaction of most readers, upon seeing these two ideas—complexity theory and intranets—conjoined, might be described as befuddlement, promptly followed by the question, “What does this have to do with my job and my intranet?” Well, I’ll argue here that some very interesting implications result in both theory and practice when you consider them together. Complexity theory is an interdisciplinary method that can be applied to a wide variety of subjects, including math, artificial intelligence, economics, ecology, and so on. The Santa Fe Institute is one focal point for a lot of new research. In addition, there is a growing field of complexity theory and social research with David Byrne, senior lecturer in social policy at the University of Durham, as a leader.
While researching for this article, I got to revisit a lot of old articles and studies from the early days of intranet development, in part because that is when most of the articles that dealt with culture and intranets were written. I also interviewed a number of people working in various positions in the intranet world, and Intranets.com surveyed its customer base to help me understand the corporate culture challenges facing intranets today.
Considering the range of inputs, there was a remarkable unanimity around the most important difficulties in getting acceptance of intranets within organizations. There was also agreement about the most successful strategies in solving those difficulties. However, the early articles revealed a very interesting dimension to the intranets and culture interaction that continues to be a real problem.
An outline of how to build a mixed human/auto categorization model Tom named "cyborg."
A discussion of auto-categorization, what it can offer a corporate intranet, and a case for a mix of human and auto-categorization.
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