Oh, please give me labels! What to consider for a Microsoft 365 metadata strategy

Strategy
Written By Dale Arseneault

We label everything. We are a global society of labels.

We label eras of humankind, geographic areas, communities, languages. We label streets, cities, political parties, aisles in a grocery store, products on the shelf. We label social media posts, web pages, companies, books, cars and companies, flora, and fauna.

We label things and create standard labeling conventions because it helps us find and understand the world around us and to communicate with each other.

Why we need labels

It's always interesting when companies are so reluctant to label their data and information, then everyone complains about difficulties finding content they know, or suspect exists. Productivity is lost, and friction is created when trying to encourage searching instead of browsing for finding information.

Search

A clever colleague of mine outlined an interesting contrast between searching on the web and searching inside an organization. Web searches tend to be more general with an expectation of many results based on simple search terms. Searching inside an organization tends to be much more focused on finding the one right content object, with a high degree of impatience for the expected result with low level of effort. Most often, that expectation is rarely met.

In simplest terms the solution is a set of commonly understood labels, some degree of control over the content of the labels, and standardized approach to labeling. Doing this for our personal photo or audio collections, for example, is a challenge for many of us. If one of your friends was looking for a particular digital or printed photo you have without your help, how successful would they be? Imagine the challenge in an organization.

Get value from data

Given the diverse sources and systems that contain data and information, many organizations are turning to approaches like master data management and enterprise metadata management which involve establishing metadata standards and taxonomies, controlled vocabularies, and some degree of formalized governance and decision making. Specific tools for master data management are gaining in popularity to enable metadata specialists centrally manage metadata across systems, and help organizations get best value from their data and information and implementations of artificial intelligence and machine learning.

With so many organizations looking to Microsoft 365 and SharePoint as key components of their content strategy, thoughtfully implementing a sustainable approach for managing metadata in SharePoint Online will positively affect information findability, user satisfaction and productivity, and adoption.

The key components of a metadata and labelling strategy include:

Talent and skills required

At one point or other, we have all created personal classification systems. These could be folder structures on our hard drives, some form of file naming convention for digital photos, or category tags for email to name a few.

Within an organization, creating classification systems and metadata standards is a great job for a trained metadata specialist or “taxonomist.” This is someone who has studied:

  • how different ideas and entities can be categorized,

  • how to structure the categories and hierarchies, and

  • how to manage changes over time.

Graduates from Master of Library & Information Science programs — experienced librarians, records managers, and archivists — have the skills and knowhow to play a major role in enterprise metadata and master data management. They are critical to building a sustainable metadata strategy in SharePoint.

Microsoft 365 labelling features

The Term Store management tool in SharePoint provides the facility for centrally managing metadata that describes content stored in SharePoint. Terms, term sets and groups can be created and managed for consistent labelling across a SharePoint tenant at different “levels” of the hub, site and library SharePoint architecture.

Content types identify metadata requirements (along with workflow, behaviour, and other settings) for items and content added to or created in SharePoint Online. Content types enable you to manage the settings for a category of information in a centralized, reusable way.

Sensitivity labels are another form of metadata to classify the sensitivity of documents according to an organization’s information security categorization model. These labels are created in the Microsoft Purview compliance portal and are applied to email, documents, and other content either by users or automatically. Sensitivity labels can also enforce information protection with features like encryption and access expiry.

Retention labels and associated rules are used to manage how long content can be retained, when it should be disposed of, and to manage the disposition process. Retention labels and rules are created in Microsoft Purview Records Management. Retention labels are applied by the end-user, or automatically through query-driven label policies.

To manage metadata across multiple systems, there are several enterprise metadata management tools available in the marketplace, including Mondeca, PoolParty, Informatica, Collibra, Talend and the Azure Data Catalog. Choice, of course, will be based on your business and technical requirements.

Management and governance

Regardless the scope and scale of your metadata management efforts, thoughtfully putting practical processes, roles, policies and standards, and some form of authority in place to manage metadata sustainably and consistently within and across systems is a critical success factor.

The important consideration is to have a mechanism in place so that decisions are made with the entire organization in mind. Leaving important information architecture, taxonomy, and metadata decisions up to individuals or individual operational or project teams is seldom effective unless some “guardrails” are in place.

The bottom line: good labels are vital in the information and data world but require thoughtful planning, implementation, and support.

Contact Gravity Union to help you building a metadata strategy for your SharePoint and Microsoft 365 environment.

References

Dale Arseneault

Dale has over 30 years of experience in information and knowledge management, service management, learning and development and management consulting.  He is passionate about helping people succeed, bridging the gap between technology and business, and building practical cases for meaningful change.

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