ReadWriteTalk » Blog Archive » Daniela Barbosa, Dow Jones

Daniela Barbosa, Dow Jones

Introduction

On this episode of ReadWriteTalk, I sit down with Daniela Barbosa from Dow Jones. Daniela is a social media maven and beyond her role at Dow Jones is a very active leader in the Data Portability Group. The majority of the interview focuses on a new eBook that she has released focused on how enterprises can adopt a blended taxonomy and folksonomies approach for managing their information. We do touch on Data Portability in the last question.

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	Sean Ammirati: Welcome to another episode of ReadWriteTalk. Today, I have Daniela Barbosa from Dow Jones with me. Daniela has written a book called “The Taxonomy and Folksonomy Cookbook” which we’re going to be talking to her about today.I’ll give you an easy opening question, Daniela, which is could you just give a quick overview of how you came with the idea for the book?Daniela Barbosa: Sure. Thanks, first of all, for allowing me to come on the show. I’m a big fan and always go for my walks and listen to ReadWrite Web Talk. Sean Ammirati: Cool.
00:39	Daniela Barbosa: I’m pleased to be on the show. The eBook like you mentioned is focused on folksonomies and taxonomies in the enterprise which certainly over the last year or two has become a big topic for enterprise information architects, information professionals to be discussing. I’ve been fascinated with the folksonomy theme for a long time probably back to the days when the originator of the term, Thomas van der Wal, was first talking about folksonomies back in 2004 in the Information Architectural Listserves.So in the enterprise space, I’ve been in the taxonomy information delivery enterprise base for the last nine years with Dow Jones. And I’ve seen so many information professionals just cringe up at the thought. You would come in and talk about taxonomies or user tags and you could see the apprehension in people’s face as you started talking about it. But I’m a true believer of that the tools consumers use in everyday life externally outside of the work eventually are going to seep their way straight into the enterprise.
01:46	And that’s actually one of the main focus of my personal blog, chit-chatting about information delivery is about those tools that we as users use that then we bring into the enterprise and user tagging tools are just one of them.So a couple of years back, I started picking up on stories, and there were some conference speakers that were talking about how they were approaching taxonomies and user tagging or folksonomies in their enterprise’s hybrid models. Folks like the Mitre case study that I used in my eBook about their Omni project. So I started talking to customers about it, and it really resonated because they saw the same things that their users and their large information consumers were using tagging. And then, obviously, the vendors started popping up, and I started talking to some of the vendors, like Connecting, for example, and it made sense to really start digging in the subject.
02:43	The eBook came out because initially it was going to be a white paper, and I’m glad that it came out as an eBook. As you’ve seen it, it’s very fun. We made it fun and very descriptive. It’s like a cookbook on how to go about approaching the subject. We conducted a roundtable in Palo Alto with some of our customers back in December of 2007 that were really struggling with these issues sort of a bird effect of feathers roundtable, people came around and started talking about it.And I took that information then I had a webinar; about 100 people attended the webinar to discuss the same topic. But we went to the Techdirt Insight Community, I do not know if you’re familiar with those, to get additional feedback from subject matter experts. They do user-consumer-analyst-experts that they bring onboard to address some of your questions.From there, we published the eBook and we’ve had some great success.
03:42	Sean Ammirati: Great! You touched on this with your passion for the last 10 years, but just to be clear, can you give your background and your role at Dow Jones quickly as well?Daniela Barbosa: Sure. So currently, I’m the business development manager for Synaptica and Taxonomy Services for the Americas. As you can imagine, I think a lot of people always say, “Dow Jones does that kind of business.” We’re a fairly large business. We’re part of the EMG which is the Enterprise Media Group. And there’s a client solutions which is called the Dow Jones Client Solutions Group that I’m part of.What it basically means is that I’m responsible for driving the business and marketplace awareness of taxonomy services and licensing to some of our previous built taxonomies through taxonomywarehouse.com where we have about 600 vocabularies available for licensing and download. Also, doing advisory and development taxonomy projects, so people will bring this in to try to address some of these issues internally. Then last but not least, Synaptica which is our taxonomy and meta data management tool. So I sort of have to do it all. And I have been with Dow Jones, like I mentioned before, since 1999 which was the Factiva side of the business that is Dow Jones’ and Reuters’ joint venture. And I do have a master’s of library and information science from the School of Library Information Science at Rutgers in New Jersey. So kind of been this business for a while.
05:11	Sean Ammirati: Great! If the name sounds familiar to listeners, but you’re thinking I don’t think I know her from Dow Jones. Daniela is one of the more active, especially among people who work at big companies, participants in social media. ReadWriteWeb did a post right after the Web 2.0 Expo last year in San Francisco, where we featured you as one of the stellar users of social media. I don’t think that’s exactly how we phrased it but that was the idea.You talked about this already and said it in your book as well that you really believe the technology people use at home, they bring to work with them. So as a really active social media user yourself, I’m just curious, how has that changed the way you interact and consume with information at work which is really, I think, the heart of why people would deploy these taxonomies and folksonomies?
06:05	Daniela Barbosa: Right. Well, I would just like to tell people I like to eat my own dog food for using the Microsoft, the mantra, and that’s what I really do. If there are things that the customers are looking at, I try to make sure I engage with them. I really have the best of both worlds. I consider myself a very, very lucky person. I have access to some of the most proprietary information sources through all the Dow Jones products and services and lots of wonderful ways to get to information. Everything is very well-organized, very well-tagged. And then I also spend a lot of time consuming and engaging with social media from blogs to Twitter to anything that I can get my hands on. I’m pretty much on top of it, and I’m really interested in it, because, like I said, it really is the way that your future employees, if not your current employees, are consuming and collaborating with information. So I think it’s really important.The other thing, obviously, that benefits me quite a bit is honestly being in Silicon Valley. I moved to California about three years ago. And since then, I’ve basically been able to engage and really join the community out here, and that has been really helpful. I would say hang out with some of my heroes.
07:22	Sean Ammirati: You do it really well. So let’s get to the meat of the book here. One of the things that jumped out at me is the survey you cited where you said, and I’ll just read the results quickly for people: 24.8% of enterprises have had a taxonomy for three years or more; 17.1% have implemented taxonomy recently, which I imagine means in less than the last three years; and then 45.7% don’t have a taxonomy in place.First of all, I do not know, you may say if I may have missed it, can you tell us where that research came from? Then, any theories on why adoption for these tools is as low as they are?
08:04	Daniela Barbosa: Okay. So the question was specific to a corporate enterprise taxonomy, so something that is provided at the highest level of the organization whether it’s built by different business units or just at a corporate level. The results were actually from the webinar that I mentioned before that we did around taxonomies and folksonomies in the enterprise. That webinar was attended by about 100-plus attendees, and they were really from a diverse group of organizations. So things like top Fortune 100 companies to small businesses.So the numbers need to be looked at that way because obviously, if we were taking the same survey at a Fortune 500 company, I have no doubt that the numbers would be higher that they would say, “Yes, we do have an enterprise taxonomy.”
08:56	So that question was a bit open-ended. The question I always ask, if you’re talking to the information professional, you’re talking to the librarians, even the technology folks that are doing all the system implementations, they probably can tell you, “Yes, we do have a corporate taxonomy, and here is where it resides and here is who owns it, here’s the process for developing it and building it out.” But how many people in normal organizations really know that they have a corporate taxonomy, in fact, in that kind of term?So I would say unless it’s really advertised, the best way to implement and deploy taxonomies is not really to talk about taxonomies but to ensure that they meet the needs of the users. So if you go out and you say, “We got a great new project. We’re implementing taxonomy,” most people are just going to throw you out because it’s scary to them, I guess.
09:50	So what we find is most organizations whether they’re small or large are going to have multiples controls of vocabularies; anything from principal list, an authority file list to a taxonomy. Obviously, as you go up the chain, you’re going to start getting more controlled vocabularies around ontologies that people are doing some pretty neat stuff. So there are various groups maintaining these. Some are maintaining the spreadsheets, some are in file servers. So it’s really hard to pinpoint a percentage exactly of a corporate taxonomy in use.Back to the point that people are scared about the word taxonomy, one of the reasons that I was intrigued about creating the eBook was to have a way for people to very easily, and I do not know how many of the audience have already read the eBook, but it’s a very easily laid out conversation piece. You can bring it to your management, bring it to your business leaders and say, “Let’s talk about this” without scaring them away. The business leaders tend to basically run for the hills when they hear the word taxonomy because they’re just scared of something they can’t understand.
11:05	Sean Ammirati: Yes. It almost has caricatures through it which bear some resemblance to you, I think, as well.Daniela Barbosa: Yes, but there’s a great story about that actually. There are two great stories and I’ll tell them to you.It’ll be funny. Number one, we had a great copywriter, Jonathan Kranz, who just did an amazing work with me in making sure that the layout and the format was put together. And my great design team, my marketing team led by Barry Allison at Dow Jones did most of the layout. And he sent me a note and said, “Daniela, can you send me some pictures because we want to do a capture of you?” I said, “Well, that’s great.” So instead of sending them a picture, what I did was I went to Flicker, I searched for my name, Daniela Barbosa, and I sent them the URL. I said, “Take your pick.” I think most people would probably pick their cutest picture, their nicest picture, and send along to them or their profile picture, their corporate picture, whatever it is. I sent them the Flicker. So he went through it with the illustrator and they picked some pictures that I guess represented me the most. The first draft of the eBook that came out, it said cookbook. So it’s very focused. It had proofs and dinners and menus and stuff like that. The cover had meat on it, and I happen to be a vegetarian that eats fish and seafood and I basically said, “You got to take the turkey and the meat but my picture looks great.”
12:42	Sean Ammirati: That’s absolutely great, and the Flickr example is a good example of one of those folksonomies, I guess, as well, these tags that people use in the consumer space, which I think is really the solution you advocate, right? You advocate what you call a blended approach where there is the enterprise taxonomy that I think exists and then adding in this social tagging. I guess that was my takeaway at least, but maybe it would be good to just say, can you elaborate a little bit on the approach that you advocate in the book? If that’s not a good representation, feel free to throw that out and clarify it some other way.
13:20	Daniela Barbosa: The blended approach, I think there is even a picture of the blender in the book. It’s really approaching it in the hybrid model. Like I mentioned before, years ago and even today, I might walk into a company and I’d say folksonomies and user tags and I can see some people in the room shiver. But it doesn’t have to be both. You don’t have to say well, I only am going to use taxonomy to organize all the information in my organization where I’m only going to use the folksonomy. There are really hybrid approaches that people can do.The reason I wrote the book is to explain to people just at the 3,000-foot level that it can be done and it should be looked at because you’re losing a lot of knowledge and a lot of entrust from your users basically if you’re not giving them the tools that they need. I hope that the eBook got that across that it’s not one versus the other. You can find the right model by taking a look at pieces from both and implementing it in the way that your information strategy is going to be.
14:33	I’ve received a lot of feedback aside from, “It’s looks great. Thanks for the content” and all that. I received a lot of feedback, in particular from information professionals or librarians in the corporate space who have had a lot of challenges in bringing up the conversation just talking about, “Should we be looking at folksonomies to enrich our corporate taxonomy in the content that we’re producing?” This has been a way for them to really engage.Honestly, I think that there are a lot of people talking about folksonomies and user tagging out there in the marketplace, tons of companies that obviously have consumer tools that do user tagging but are also coming in to the enterprise space. I mentioned some of those in my eBook. I think it really helps at least in the enterprise space for this being a Dow Jones’ publication versus just an eBook or a white paper that a startup or someone else has written out. I think that it’s a big benefit of doing that.
15:46	Sean Ammirati: For what it’s worth, I think you do a great job highlighting the technologies and approaches that can work. One thing I thought will be interesting to get you to comment on a little bit is I imagine the behavior part of this, especially getting the social tagging piece now, that getting the behavior change of people is as important as actually getting the technology in place. So anything you’ve seen that has really worked well to get enterprises to adopt this blended approach where there’s a social element to it as well and their workers participate in the process?
16:20	Daniela Barbosa: Yes. The adoption question, right? How do you get it? If you build it, do they come?When discussing this with customers, I call it change management 2.0. Some people cringe up at 2.0. I like it; it’s easy. People understand what I mean when I say change management 2.0. It’s really addressing how your users are going to use your tools but in today’s world.The principles of designing any sort of tool that users are going to use are going to be the same. So consumer sites, whether they’re trying to implement user tagging features or comments or video, anything will do, usability is really the key. So if you give them something that they can’t do better somewhere else, they’re going to come and use it. So that’s the primary thing. So make sure that whatever you’re looking at is going to be usable for your users in their specific instance of it.
17:22	I think one of the phrases that I use in the eBook also is, “The enlightened self.” So any tool that you’re trying to implement and obviously a user-tagging tool is going to be the same but any tool really must serve the individual’s needs. So it’s the old “what’s in it for me” question. If you can address the “what’s in it for me” and make sure that you had your benefit statements up front, you’re going to be much more successful in any deployment but especially around user tools.If you think about it, Sean, I work with customers in all different levels; small businesses but also very large businesses that have a fairly older user base that are going to not adopt to these tools very quickly. So you need to really think through those processes.
18:13	A key element in any successful user tagging and hybrid approach is to involve your early adopters first. So your early adopters are obviously people like me. Dow Jones was going to be implementing something, there are a bunch of us at Dow Jones that are really engaged in the 2.0 tools and engagement. So bring them into the fold. Don’t try to build a tool and put a strategy together for someone that is sitting in the corporate office without any feedback from the users. So I think that’s really important. A couple of the other things very specific to tagging tools is to seed the system. I’ve seen some failures out there that they buy a piece of software or they customize a piece of software whether it’s open source or something proprietary, and they launch it and they do great marketing and beautiful messages, get the marketing group involved. Then what happens is it has no information in it. It has no tags. It has no users. It takes a long time to actually build that up.
19:27	So before you launch, make sure that you seed the system. So go to your early adopters and say, “Guys, I know you’re using Furl or Magnolia or Delicious Can we possibly take a look at your tags there and bring them in to our system? We’ll clean them up and make sure they’re really valuable.” So take the time to really seed the tool.The other thing is looking at existing tools. I’ve also seen customers who try to just take a piece of software and put it out there not consistent with the other tools that the users are using already. So at the launch or you’re starting to talk to users about using a user-tagging tool but it is completely independent of everything else which doesn’t make sense. Something else they need to learn to how to use.
20:23	So don’t do that. Look at your existing tools. How can you augment them? Some of the tools out there that are available can be very easily integrated into what you already have. So don’t make it complex for the user because they’re not going to use it. Remember, they’re used to using Delicious and Magnolia and other tools, the other browsers, so they’re not going to want something that are client-based tagging tools and sorts.Then the last but not the least, and I always get a chuckle especially having conversations with customers about this, are some of the misconceptions. We talk about that in the eBook. Make sure those misconceptions are addressed up front with your management team and also with your users. So make sure that security issues, this document is top secret, nobody can see it if I tag it, won’t the whole world see it? Make sure that people understand that in the corporate context, you can actually use your enterprise security tools with your tagging tools and that shouldn’t be an issue.
21:27	Curse words and bad words, those are always my favorite. But in the corporate space once again, it’s a little bit different, everybody can tag something, and you tag something with a curse word and a bad word, people are going to know. “Daniela used a bad word to tag this.” I don’t think that, in the corporate space, that is appropriate behavior, and most people don’t do it. Plus you can use software to basically run systems and say this word was used, and you can just delete it or move it out.So that definitely addresses that. And if you take a look at my eBook, you’ll see the section which really talks about some other misconceptions that you should address up front to make sure that your users and the enterprise knows where you’re headed.
22:13	Sean Ammirati: That’s good. One thing that didn’t jump out of me in the book but that you just said that I thought was interesting in your last answer was using your early adopters’ tags from Delicious or Magnolia or Furl. That’s really cool. I hadn’t really thought about that. I could see how that would be pretty powerful though to get, as you called it, see data in the systems. That’s nice.You’ve finished the eBook with a shopping list to continue the cookbook analogy, and it’s basically about 15 questions that you should consider if you’re thinking about adopting one of these. If you had to pick the three most important questions from that list or just the three most important questions in general thinking about systems like this to consider, what would they be and why?
22:58	Daniela Barbosa: It’s obviously a combination of them but it’s really before you even jump into looking at tools whether tools are available internally or externally, it’s really answering the questions of: How is this going to benefit my organization? Why am I doing this? Am I doing this so my users are going to be able to find more content via our search engine? Are we doing this because we want to make sure that we’re capturing all this knowledge? For some organizations, obviously, that is a big weight on their shoulders right now because a lot of their employees are retiring, the baby boomers are moving out. So why are you particularly doing this? Is your search not working well? Are people tagging things?One of the things that I did a couple of months back, probably last year when I started researching this topic, was I spent a lot of time on delicious looking at people’s tags to see how many people were actually tagging internal documents. So actual URLs that pop up on delicious that I know are at specific companies because it’s a dot-net and you can’t access them. Is that a security issue? Do you see a lot of that?
24:18	So you really need to decide and come up with a couple of answers actually of: Why am I doing this? How is this going to benefit my organization and obviously my users?The other thing that is extremely important and maybe it’s because I went to a library school and I’m a pro-librarian is that you need to have your taxonomists, information professionals, information architectures really be part of the project. If you’re in marketing or if you’re just corporate communications or even IT, we see a lot of these projects originating in IT, make sure you reach out to the people that have the skills. And those are the skills of information organization. Make sure that they’re involved in what you’re doing.And then back to the early adopters. Go find the early adopters in the organization and ask them exactly what you should be doing and how you should be doing it. They’re pretty much good indicators of how the rest of the organization is eventually going to be down the path.
25:26	Sean Ammirati: Makes a ton of sense. Hopefully people at this point are pretty interested, and if they haven’t yet downloaded and read your eBook, how can they get a hold of that?Daniela Barbosa: I always crack up because I see my little caricature everywhere. I know that we’ve been running a banner on ReadWriteWeb and there are a couple of other sites. It’s a personal chuckle for me. But you can always go to www.factiva.com and like I mentioned, Factiva is the Dow Jones’ part of the business that I’m in. On there, you’ll see a big banner for the cookbook at this point.You can also go to my blog. I have a banner on there too which is danielabarbosa.com, and I’m also happy to send copies to anyone, and they can contact me via email at daniela.barbosa@dowjones.com. If you do show notes, Sean, maybe you could put that information in there.
26:22	Sean Ammirati: I will for sure. I’ll have links to that information at the top there. Finally, you know I can’t do an interview with you and not ask you one question about data portability. So you recently were elected the chairperson at the Data Portability Steering Group. It’s a group that’s generated a lot of conversation. I think it’s a good safe way to describe it without getting into any of the history. We have had Chris Saad on ReadWriteTalk before he did a great interview and was really gracious with his time.Without getting into any of the history there, I am curious what we can expect in the next few months from the Data Portability Group under your leadership here.
27:05	Daniela Barbosa: Sure. I’m just the chairperson. There are obviously lots of other folks. I just want to obviously make it clear that the data portability project is something I’ve been involved on; I’m one of the cofounders back in November of 2007. It seems like a lifetime away but it hasn’t even been a year when we started talking about data portability as a project. I’m not an official member on behalf of Dow Jones but I certainly have management support to participate and be part of the steering committee and now chairperson of the steering committee as well. There are some great people.I know that Marshall covered it recently on ReadWrite Web the other folks that are involved so it’s not just me because I’m a very busy person as well.One of the things that I’m just fascinated about is having a conversation the other day with someone; how the organization was formed and the kind of participatory organization that we really are which is very unique. I think that we’ve certainly stumbled over a couple of blocks over the last few months, some of them rocks that were thrown at us, some that we threw ourselves.
28:23	I got involved in data portability because as a user, the issues that data portability project are addressing were important to me. So I was already very interested in the standards and the conversations around things like OpenID, APML which is the attention profile markup language. So OpenID from the fact that in the enterprise space, user registration is for proprietary services like those that Factiva and Dow Jones offers. It’s just horrendous like we spent hours and many billable hours trying to build systems so that people don’t have to authenticate again to a system whether it’s ours or other third parties. APML which is the attention profile stuff was very interesting to me from filtering when you’re trying to filter thousands of sources and content sources. Sales people and marketing people, their attention changes all the time and building out queries.
29:19	When I first started working for Dow Jones nine years ago, I was doing a lot of query building for customers and 2,048 characters of a query so you can get the top filtered information to you. In today’s world, this kind of changes because your attention really changes as you go along. So APML was something that I was very interested in.Then obviously being an information professional, a taxonomist, things like microformats and RDF and semantic stuff so that really got me involved. So that was how I got involved in data portability.But to answer your question as to what can you expect now that we have a steering committee, we have people who are voting, who we’ve already passed a bunch of task forces and missions, our next thing is we plan on having a draft in the next week of the vision tasks, the mission-vision statement. We obviously had a couple of them and they’re pretty finalized but we needed to make sure that the steering committee was in place. Our governance structure will be announced soon. We also have a communications group that is being led right now and chaired by Chris Saad, so that we make sure that the communications to the community are very clear. We always have people telling us, “We get to the wiki. We can’t figure out what you guys are doing.” We need a new logo.
30:42	Sean Ammirati: Again.Daniela Barbosa: I’m sure, Sean, you’ve heard the “what happened with our logo” story, but finalizing the logo, getting that done.One of the things that I’m the most interested in, and actually leading, is this data portability grid tool. I’m not sure if you - Sean Ammirati: I have not heard about that. No. Daniela Barbosa: Okay. So back about a couple of months ago, we were at the Data Sharing Summit with a bunch of other folks, and one of the sessions that we did and Mark Canter actually led the discussion and it was right when MySpace, FaceBook and Google, they all came out with their projects, with their data space portability projects and announcements.
31:21	And one of the things we did is we created this huge grid and we called it the Service Provider Grid and it was a big wall. We started writing all the vendors on the top and all the services that they provide along the left side of this big grid. And we had a lot of vendors there; Yahoo was there, Google was there, Plaxo, Six Apart, all those guys were there. So they went it and basically filled out all this information. So what we agreed upon with the data sharing folks is that we were going to create a data portability project group. It was actually going to create this grid tool that would be available for people to go and take a look at so you can do comparisons.I think that’s going to be a pretty powerful deliverable from the data portability group that we can build upon in the very near future because one of the things that people always ask us about is: Will you ever get to the point where you can actually score companies and vendors of how they score against data portability principles?So we’re getting there, and I’m very excited that all our volunteers in the group have been doing so much work for us.
32:31	Sean Ammirati: Cool. Great answer. Yes, I really did want to talk to you about your eBook today but I do not know that the guys would have forgiven me if I wouldn’t have asked you at least one data portability question.Daniela Barbosa: It’s all part of it, right? You mentioned my corporate media evangelist, really being out there and involved in these things whether they’re directly related to the revenue goals that I have at Dow Jones or really just making Dow Jones and honestly Daniela Barbosa a thought leader and a participant of these conversations, I think that’s important. So I’m always happy to answer any questions you have.Sean Ammirati: Cool. We’ll probably circle back at some point and maybe do one of our ReadWriteWeb Lives where we have a bunch of different authors on to talk about data portability at some point.
33:24	Daniela Barbosa: We’d love to do that.Sean Ammirati: Cool. That will be awesome. We’ll set that up then. This was great though. I really appreciate your time today, Daniela, and also even before your time today, your hard work put in the eBook together. So again, if you’re listening to this on your iPod, you can go to readwritetalk.com, we’ll have all the links to both Daniela’s book and also the blog in the show notes. We’ll be back again soon with another interview for ReadWrite Talk. So thanks a lot, Daniela.Daniela Barbosa: Thanks, Sean.

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