Editor's note: There aren't many better practitioners, in my opinion, to write a chapter about taxonomy maintenance – the sometimes neglected, often under-valued art of ensuring the taxonomy remains useful, relevant and accurate. Drawing from her experience in a government department in England, Helen covers the kinds of scenarios that could arise, from political changes to the insistent senior stakeholder who wants a term updated without the due process any other request would have to go through.

Introduction

Today is a great day! Your taxonomy has finally launched. All of your planning and preparation has come together. Whether you had a ‘big bang’ or a lower key gradual implementation, today has been your ‘go live’ day.

You can allow yourself a moment to reflect, deal with any last-minute issues and finish writing up your lessons learned report. But what happens tomorrow? And the day after that? How do you manage, maintain and develop what you have so that it remains relevant to the work of your organisation?

This chapter provides practical examples. We will look at setting the scene for taxonomy maintenance in your organisation, maintenance programme planning and the ongoing sourcing and creation of new terms. We will cover checks and reviews of terms for you, your team and subject matter experts, coping with organisational restructures and the record keeping that you might need to consider.

This case study includes ideas that have been tested in the real world and asks questions to make you think about what might suit you in your organisation. Hopefully this will give you some pointers for how you might want to set up your maintenance processes. Not everything will work everywhere, so treat this as a ‘pick and mix’ menu of techniques that you can adapt for your situation.

The ideas in this chapter are drawn from my experience of managing the subject taxonomy at the Department for Education (DfE) in England.

The purpose of the taxonomy at DfE is to help the department to categorise its information, correspondence and telephone calls in a consistent way.

The coverage of the taxonomy spans all of the subject areas for which the DfE has responsibility, plus terms that cover internal administration. This means that everyone in the department and its agencies (approximately 7,000 people in January 2021), whether they be working in policy development, delivery of services or operational activities, should be able to find subject terms to meet their requirements.