Taxonomy helps with IT planning!

Taxonomy is the process of classification or the study of the process itself. Usually we classify items using one or more hierarchies. For example in accounting we use the chart of accounts to classify the nature of an item (the what) and the organizational hierarchy to classify which part of the organization is responsible for the item (the where).

Taxonomy helps us organize our knowledge and look for gaps. The gaps in the Periodic Table of the Elements helped scientist discover new elements. Gaps in the Standard Model of physics led to the discovery of new particles.

We can use the classifications we’ve established to help brainstorm new ideas. For example Porter’s model of competition categorizes competitive threats (see Porter’s Five Forces on Wikipedia).  We might brainstorm threats from substitute products — if we were a computer hardware vendor some years ago we might have identified cloud computing and factored this into our thinking. 

While very useful there are some dangers with taxonomy. One is over doing it. If you have far more slots in your classification scheme than you have items to classify you need to simplify. Reduce the number of hierarchies or group items at a higher level.

Another and greater danger is using  classifications that are not relevant to the business when communicating your IT Plan. I find the Enterprise Architecture crowd often guilty of this offense. Don’t get me wrong. There are lots of taxonomies useful to the IT planner but not relevant to the business. Treat these as scaffolding that can be removed when speaking to the business and come up with classifications that make sense to your non-IT colleagues.

So use well chosen classifications to organize your IT plans and look for gaps. Find gaps using classifications to brainstorming.  Don’t go overboard and readjust your classifications to be meaningful to the business when communicating your plan.