The Taxonomy of Baker Hughes

An APQC report provided the follow details on the taxonomy of Baker Hughes. It looks good… but it's not the only case study.

Taxonomy Strategies apparently did some work for Baker Hughes. Specifically, it:

"Worked with five Baker Hughes divisions to develop a consensus around three common vocabularies to demonstrate the feasibility and value of an enterprise taxonomy. Recommendations were provided on how to integrate the taxonomy with the content management system, portal and search engine environments."

We don't have more details but we can guess based on the work they did with Halliburton:

"Taxonomy Strategies worked with Halliburton's knowledge management staff to consolidate multiple taxonomies that had been developed for separate product lines, and to integrate them into a content architecture to be implemented as part of a new content management system. An important result of the project was the recognition that the logistics (materials and equipment) and the marketing (energy and petroleum lifecycle) views needed to be reconciled and mapped to each other in order to solve the problem. Eleven taxonomy branches or facets were implemented as a result of the project: Product Groups; Tools; Oil, Gas and Chemicals; Organization; Challenges; Other Materials; Content Types; Locations; Health, Safety and Environment; Energy and Petroleum Lifecycle; and Business Processes."

"Currently, user communities are being trained to tag content using the new taxonomy and the new content management system. Legacy and new content will be tagged with values from the taxonomy before it is published to specialist portals, extranets, and www sites. The taxonomy data for each piece of content will then be available to build the search indexes and the personalization entitlements for each portal. New interfaces and search tools that can take advantage of the taxonomy beginning to be used by Halliburton are beginning to be prototyped and tested."

ConceptSearching also worked with Baker Hughes on its implementations of SharePoint 2010 and FAST. Specifically:

"Baker Hughes Oil Field Operations has selected conceptClassifier for SharePoint to provide the framework for their SharePoint 2010 Intranet. Baker Hughes, a top-tier oilfield service company with a century-long track record delivers solutions that help oil and gas operators make the most of their reservoirs will be using conceptClassifier for SharePoint to augment SharePoint 2010 and FAST Search to deliver a precise and rich content experience to users of its Intranet. Concept Searching products were chosen over a number of competitive offerings for their unique native integration with the SharePoint Term Store and their ability to tag content and apply action to that content based upon its meaning."

So we don't know, specifically, what Taxonomy Strategies did for Baker Hughes. But we can get a sense of what it did for Halliburton.

Smith, et al. 2004. Taxonomy: a knowledge sharing enabler.

• Halliburton basically put "anything that was important to anyone on the intranet. Although document control procedures had been used for hard copies, controls were typically not properly applied to electronic information."
• "The gains made in sharing were lost in information quality, with many authors forgetting about their content altogether."
• Problems with search precision
• Metadata: content owner, author, review date, expiration date, taxonomy terms
• The taxonomy facets:
• Content type
• Technical documents
• Research notes
• Data sheets
• Sales and marketing docs
• Advertisements
• Case histories
• Price lists
• Business requirements
• Proposals
• Geographical location
• Organizations
• E&P Lifecycle
• Business Process
• Health Safety and Environment (HSE)
• Customer challenges
• Borehole challenges
• Drilling challenges
• Environmental challenges
• Formation challenges
• Maintenance challenges
• Production challenges
• Real time decisions
• Reducing costs
• Reserve-resource calculation
• Reservoir challenges
• Well control challenges
• Product Groups
• Product Names
• Tools & Component
• Oil, Gas, Chemicals and Lubricants
• Other Materials and Equipment
• General Subjects
• Addition document management attributes:
• Title
• Description
• Author
• Content owner
• Launch date
• Review date
• Expiration data
• Security access control
• They used "Collection Warrant" to build the taxonomy and reduce redundancy
• Reusing SAP content for authority files
• Faster initial development
• Reduced confusion by using existing agreements
• Lower maintenance cost
• They used comparables from:
• Petrotechnical Open Standards Consortium (POSC)
• NASA taxonomy
• And then there was a change management process.