How can the use of common terminology, often rereferred to as taxonomy, help improve search? How can taxonomy help employee profile tools? We will answer these and other related questions in this article, especially as they relate to the adoption of an employee profile tool or solution.
A taxonomy is a structured set of names and descriptions used to organise information and documents in consistent way. It provides a common language to describe business processes. It is used to categorise content in a way that makes it intuitive for users to find.
Information architecture (IA) is a manifestation of how relevant information assets that exist in your organisation are made available to people to help them do their job. The key word here is relevant.
A good taxonomy will support the wider information architecture to allow platform capabilities more effectively deliver relevant content to people. This is the case whether you are dealing with digital content like files, images, rich media assets like video or people’s skill profiles in an employee profile tool or solution.
Additional challenges in defining and managing a useful skills taxonomy as part of the broader information architecture also include the following:
A taxonomy will evolve over time and this evolution needs to be both manageable and managed.
Information policies must be aligned with known business objectives in order to support these business objectives. This is especially important when developing a relevant, effective and authoritative taxonomies for use in an employee profile tool.
It is important that any employee profile tool can be maintained by people who are subject matter experts in the core operations of the business. These subject matter experts will intuitively develop a common vocabulary for the organisation that is relevant and will be recognised by other users of the system.
Familiarity and relevance are two key factors that will ensure any employee profile tool is actually used. To understand the other key considerations for uncovering your organisation’s hidden skills and expertise, take a look at our article on How to create an effective employee skills inventory (2021).
Different people need to access an organisation’s information assets in different ways in order for the information to provide value to that person’s role
How do you effectively measure how valuable an existing information architecture is for use in an employee profile tool? Value doesn’t necessarily come only from use.
When working with an organisation’s electronic document information, we work with files. When these files moved from the physical world to the digital world, we adopted the same base metaphor of filing cabinets that contained spearate drawers and section in the drawers for sorting and storing the files in an ordered manner.
This approach – either in the physical or in the digital world, achieves two key objectives:
The concept of a “file” and a “file folder” as a way of storing digital data has become so ingrained, that we think of it as natural, but it’s not: It was invented in 1983 by Apple (wikipedia)
During the initial planning stage it is important that you identify all major skills and expertise groupings. These groupings will help lay the foundation term sets or concepts, as they are rereferred to in a taxonomic structure.
The reality is that all organisational taxonomies will ultimately be built but many start off by using pre-built or foundation taxonomies.
There are a number of different sources available for foundation taxonomies. These sources can be inside as well as outside your organisation. Common internal sources for taxonomies, or sets of terms that can be organised into taxonomies, might include:
As mentioned before, these foundation taxonomies will inevitably grow and change over time. We look at taxonomy governance later, but know that you do NOT need to create the perfect, complete taxonomy from the start!
WAND Foundation Taxonomies for Employee Skills Tool
Webinar – Taxonomy Based Skills Profiles and Expertise Search in Microsoft SharePoint
We’re very pleased to announce the latest release of our Enterprise Skills Management solution, TeamFolio (2021.12.10.0000): Curated Definitions is now available. Based on customer feedback we’ve added a major new feature to our market-leading product: Curated Definitions and Disabled Definitions.
Curated definitions leverage new status settings within the Biography Field Definitions that enhance the way TeamFolio Administrators can manage their definition behaviours.
Curated Biography Field Definitions provide centralised control over how data in individual definitions can be edited. Only users with elevated permissions can edit content in a curated definition, even if that definition is on their own profile.
Disabled definitions provide a convenient way to enforce exclusion of all skills within the definition from appearing on user profiles, biography templates, search results and Nexus page results.
Crucially, this is enforced without requiring deletion so the definition and all associated skills and endorsements can be easily re-enabled at any time without any loss of data.
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In this post, we will explain how to configure Postman to use Azure Active Directory Authorisation Code Flow to authenticate as a user within your organisation, obtain an access token with the required scope on their behalf and then invoke the WebAPI using that access token.
There are a few steps required to achieve this. Namely:
• Create an application registration for Postman to use to authenticate the user using the Authorisation Code flow.
• Configure the Authentication options in Postman to perform the browser based authentication of the user which then allows Postman to capture the access token.
• Configure a sample request which invokes the WebAPI using the captured access token.
For the basis of this post let’s assume you’ve already installed Postman and have created an appropriate account or subscription and you are logged in.
Login to your Azure tenant portal (https://portal.azure.com).
Click on ‘Azure Active Directory’ to open the Azure Active Directory blade.
Click on the ‘App Registrations’ from the nav menu to open the Application Registrations blade.
Click on ‘New Registration’.
Give your application a name. e.g. MyWebAPI.Postman. Select ‘Accounts in this organisation only’ . Add the following redirect uri: https://oauth.pstmn.io/v1/callback and click ‘Register’. This will register the application and then open the Application Registration blade for the application.
Click ‘Certificates & Secrets’. Create a client secret – make a note of the value, you’ll need it later.
Click ‘API Permissions’ and ‘Add a permission’. Select ‘My APIs’ and choose your WebAPI – select ‘Delegated Permissions’ and then the permission scope you wish to add. Click ‘Add permissions’ to return to the blade.
Grant Administrative consent for the permissions on behalf of all users.
Postman offers various ways to use authentication options – for this post we’re going to create a new workspace and configure the authentication token on the workspace and inherit the token for all requests we create within the workspace. In this way, we can refresh the token when it expires just once rather than for every request we want to test.
Postman includes lots of great documentation on workspaces and how to organise your requests and so on – I recommend it.
In Postman, using the workspace of your choice, create a new collection and give it a name. e.g. ‘MyWebAPI’.
On the ‘Authorization’ tab – select ‘OAuth 2.0’ and ‘Add auth data to’ set to ‘Request Headers’.
Current Token section – leave as default.
In the ‘Configure New Token section’ – select ‘Edit Token Configuration’ – this will enable the fields below for editing.
Change ‘Grant Type’ to ‘Authorization Code’.
Check ‘Authorize using Browser’.
Set ‘Auth Url’ – use the value from the ‘OAuth 2.0 authorization endpoint (v2)’ field in the ‘Overview’ ‘Endpoints’ page of the Application Registration for Postman.
Set ‘Access Token Url’ – use the value from the ‘OAuth 2.0 token endpoint (v2)’ field in the ‘Overview’ ‘Endpoints’ page of the Application Registration for Postman.
Set ‘Client ID’ and ‘Client Secret’ fields using the application id from the ‘Overview’ page of the Application Registration for Postman. The secret you should have noted earlier – if not, and it’s no longer readable, delete it and create a new one.
Set ‘Scope’ to the API Permission added to the Application Registration for Postman. It should be in the form of ‘api://<guid>/<scope>’ e.g. ‘api://12345678-1234-5678-1234-123456789101/License.Read’.
Set ‘Client Authentication’ to ‘Send as Basic Auth Header’.
Click the ‘Get New Access Token’ button – this should launch the browser requesting you to login. Use the credentials of the user you wish to test. Successfully logging in will display a popup window asking to open the Token in Postman. Click yes and then use the token in Postman.
That’s it – you’re done!
In this post, we configured an Azure Active Directory Application Registration to secure your WebAPI using Delegated Permissions and Scopes for users within your organisation only.
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We’re very pleased to announce the latest release of our Enterprise Skills Management solution, TeamFolio (2021.11.26.0000) is now available. Based on customer feedback we’ve added two new and often-requested major features to our market-leading product: Featured Documents and Evidence Documents.
Featured Documents presents a new information panel embedded directly within the User Profile page showing document links to documents relevant to the user’s profile (e.g. a CV or Resume) or which showcase other achievements (e.g. links to articles in published journals or professional body publications). Links to both internal and external resources are supported.
Users can instantly view associated, relevant documentary content for any user by simply clicking the link directly from within the panel.
Subject to configuration, users and administrators can manage their own or others featured documents using a simple UI accessible directly within the user profile page. Adding and removing featured document links is a single click.
Evidence Documents presents a new information icon embedded directly within enabled Skills within the User Profile page showing available links to documents relevant to the user’s specific skill (e.g. a Certificates, Diplomas, Awards or links to articles in published journals or professional body publications). Links to both internal and external resources are supported.
Clicking the information icon presents an information model dialog where Users can instantly view associated, relevant documentary evidence for the user skill simply by clicking the link.
Subject to configuration, users and administrators can manage their own and others evidence documents using a simple UI accessible directly within the user profile page.
Contact us for more information about this TeamFolio Release or general product information.
The significant financial benefits of virtualised environments running in the cloud versus on-premise server environments are already well known and industry proven. On-premise environments are costly to purchase, construct, secure, maintain and run. Leveraging virtualised cloud technologies allows businesses to take advantage of managed, shared infrastructures in purpose-built facilities where economies of scale can significantly reduce costs.
What is far less well known and understood are the potential decarbonisation benefits available to your business in combatting climate change through adoption of your own net zero objectives assisted by the implementation of virtualisation and cloud technologies.
Net zero is not zero emissions. A net zero state is achieved when the amount of carbon being released into the atmosphere by your business as a whole is balanced by the amount of carbon being removed by your business.
In a nutshell, the carbon emissions of your business can be quantified across three broad scopes in accordance with the Green House Gas Protocol (GHGP) 2001:
Direct emissions – from sources such as fuel, vehicles and chemicals.
Indirect emissions – from sources such as purchased energy like electricity, steam, heating and cooling.
Other indirect emissions – from sources such as transportation, travel and purchased products and services. This scope is the hardest to control and quantify whilst typically accounting for more than 70% of the average business carbon footprint.
Scope 3 includes carbon emissions from purchased products and services.
As such, the assessment of your business must necessarily include the carbon emissions of your suppliers and, by extension, will also be included in any assessment of your clients and customers. Scope 3 creates a chain of responsibility within the value chain of your business which means that as climate change initiatives continue to develop the carbon emissions of your business will become an increasingly crucial differentiator in their respective marketplaces.
Cloud technologies and virtualisation are purchased products and services as per scope 3 for the purposes of GHGP assessment. Therefore, the carbon credentials of the chosen cloud provider will impact directly on the assessment of your business.
Fortunately, the major providers are already well underway in their transition towards their net zero objectives and beyond.
Both Microsoft and Google already boast operating at net zero and have made statements expressing their goal to reach net negative before 2030. Amazon are currently working toward their goal of powering their operations using 100% renewable energy by 2025.
Renewable energy initiatives and energy efficient technologies are revolutionising the way datacentres operate.
Technologies such as liquid immersion cooling and grid-interactive power with clean energy backup have achieved significant gains in not only reducing carbon emissions but also in lowering energy and water consumption levels by significant margins.
Virtualisation enables datacentres to fully optimise the utilisation of their physical resources.
Consolidating multiple workloads can drastically reduce the physical resources required to run them.
Automated migration of solutions can be performed during periods of peak or low demand, dynamically scaling up or scaling out to meet demand.
Hibernation can preserve the last state of a solution before powering it off. This allows for much speedier re-activation when demand occurs and does not require reloading of state or data.
Business solutions which are designed and developed specifically for deployment to virtualised environments running in the cloud are able to leverage technologies to minimise energy usage.
The financial demands of re-engineering legacy solutions to adapt them to the cloud is prohibitive for most independent software vendors (ISVs) meaning that migrated legacy software solutions from on-premise servers to virtualised instances on the cloud are almost always virtualised server instances – always-on irrespective of the current level of demand.
TeamFolio is our market-leading enterprise skills management solution and has been designed and developed from the ground-up to integrate seamlessly to your physical and virtual environments.
Designed for the cloud means TeamFolio can be fully managed and automated to take full advantage of the current and future physical and virtual infrastructure technologies offered by your chosen provider.
Developed for the cloud ensures the code is optimised and secure whilst the user interface functions effectively and responsively over the internet.
If you want to see some of these solutions in practice, you can find more information here.
How can using taxonomy for an employee skills inventory help? This article answers some of the questions related to this common challenge for organisations.
In larger organisations, we rarely know more than 15-20% of our colleagues’ skills without access to some sort of employee skills inventory.
The bigger the organisation or more geographically dispersed the team is, the less we know about our collective skills, experience and areas expertise.
In this article we will look at why an effective employee skills inventory can become one of the organisations most important operational systems. As the former CEO of Hewlett Packard once famously said:
“If HP knew what HP knows, we’d be three times more productive.”
Lew Platt, CEO Hewlett-Packard 1992-1999
First we should understand what we mean by an employee skills inventory. In its simplest form, it is a list of people’s skills that can be searched by anyone in the team.
People search the list to find others on the team who have a specific skill or set of skills that would be helpful for a project, a task needing to be done or a question needing answered.
In this article, we will provide examples of effective employee skills this and cover these key considerations:
To successfully harness your team’s expertise, you first need to know what expertise actually exists. The list or system should allow people to easily let others in the organisation know what expertise they can contribute.
There are many situations where being able to quickly find people who already have knowledge about a particular subject will be helpful. Examples could include:
Organisations often try to cater for many of these scenarios with Human Resource information systems (HRIS). We discuss why this might not work below.
The type of information held in an employee skills inventory is very similar, and sometimes identical to information held in HR systems. It is important to know what information already exists in your organisation and if some of this information can be made available to all employees.
In many cases, the purpose for accessing this type of information by operational staff can be difficualt to facilitate with HR systems. This is because HR systems can be complex, expensive and challenging to share subsets of people’s information without exposing potentially confidential information.
An effective employee skills inventory caters for the operational requirements while protecting and integrating with HR systems. It is possible to have the best of both worlds.
People want to have their skills valued. They want to make a positive contribution to the team and the organisation.
A system that allows employees to showcase their skills and experience improves their engagement with colleagues and the wider organisation.
Being able to find people easily, quickly and from wherever you are, will really help individuals with their efforts. Knowing you are able to easily contact an expert and tap into a wealth of experience, improves confidence, spreads knowledge and accelerates productivity.
With an up to date, searchable inventory of all the skills and experience colleagues have to offer, even just being able to quickly find a timely answer a question can be super helpful for someone trying to do their job. Being able to put one person in touch with another person so they can have a quick conversation is still the most effective use of technology.
One of the best uses of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies is in simply helping people to connect, so that human intelligence and human learning can be better utilised!
People often see many challenges when they try to design an effective system or solution. Here are some of the typical challenges, some that you may already have experienced.
Following this section, we look at some of the ways to avoid or address these challenges.
If any system is not easy to use, it will simply not be used. It is very important for this type of system to be used as frequently as possible and by as many employees as possible if the system is to be useful.
How much a system is used will be significantly influenced by how easy it is to use. Ease of use depends on:
This might not seem too important to begin with, but if two people use two different phrases to describe the same skill or project or qualification, it becomes very difficult to find both of these people who have the same expertise.
Even if we speak the same language, people in different parts of the world will have different words for the same thing. They may use the same word but mean different things. And of course many organisations have employees across the world who speak different languages.
How does an organisation create an effective employee skills inventory with these challenges?
If it takes too long before the system becomes useful for enough people in the organisation, there is often a loss of momentum with people adopting the system. This can become a downward spiral. Fewer people using the system means the system is less useful, so even fewer people use it – and so on.
Organisations often look to adapt existing IT Network, ERP or HR systems as a quick way for creating an employee skills inventory that is accessible to all staff. For many small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs), this can quickly become a time consuming and expensive approach.
The example above, where organisations try using IT Network directory systems, is a good example of people trying ti use a system that was not designed for storing people’s skills profiles.
We have looked at some of the challenges organisations face when trying to develop an employee skills inventory. Here are some key points to consider for developing an effective employee skills inventory.
The two things the system needs to do well are:
Use the 80:20 rule, also known as the Pareto principle, to quickly make the system useful to as many people as possible. A person does not need to spend hours filling out their life history for them to be findable on the system.
People should only need to spend a few minutes creating a profile and then maybe a few more minutes each week keeping this profile updated.
Keep the following design principles in mind:
Part of making a system quick and easy to use can mean providing people with pick lists of skills or past experiences. This approach means they can be guided through the creation of a skills profile quickly.
Other advantages are that:
There are many benefits to using taxonomy in this and other types of search focused information systems. You can read more in our article about using taxonomy for an employee skills inventory.
As already mentioned, making it easy for people to use the system to provide a simple list of their key skills and to fine other people’s skills is so important.
To help support all employees when you first introduce an employee skills inventory, make sure you’re already prepared with the right support and communications that is available to everyone. Having a user adoption plan is as important as having the system itself.
If your organisation still doesn’t have some sort of system that allows people to search for other people’s skills, make a start now.
Start by asking yourselves why you do not yet have an effective system. The answers will help you to get started with a plan to get something in place.
There are immediate benefits to an organisation for quickly having some form of searchable employee skills inventory.
If you want to see some of these solutions in practice, you can find more information here.