Intelligent Enterprise

There's a particular Dilbert cartoon making the rounds that pokes good fun at Web 2.0 in general and "folksonomies" in particular.

Surely there is much to satirize here. Cartoonist Scott Adams is particularly adept at surfacing (and pillorying) vague but alluring-sounding words like "folksonomy" and "platform" that, yes, we all over-use. But getting Dilberted also represents a certain coming of age, marking a concept passing from obscurity to early-stage hype, at least among tech and information management types.

As an analyst, I'll acknowledge the confusion and hype, but also argue that it's possible to sort out a lot of this stuff and identify what your enterprise needs to do going forward, including with respect to social information organization, of which folksonomies represent just one dimension. The principal objective of our Information Organisation & Access (IOA) certificate courses is to ground you in the fundamentals of taxonomies, tagging, and search, then explore newer approaches (like folksonomies) that you can "fit" into a broader enterprise information strategy. The Masters-level course in particular shows you how to grapple with these issues on a large scale.

I'll guess you go to more than enough meetings where people talk about information "platforms." We want to give you practical tools to get those repositories in shape -- who knows, perhaps even with some help from folksonomies.

Tony Byrne is founder and lead analyst at CMS Watch. Write him at tbyrne@cmswatch.com.