Building a Metadata Infrastructure at American Greetings (taxonomy, faceted search, business process modelling, governance)

Earley & Associates, Inc. | Classification: CONFIDENTIAL USE, NO REPRINTS
Copyright © 2013 Earley & Associates, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Metadata in Business, The
American Greetings Case
Study
Semantic Web Meetup
2013-06-25
Robin Macrae
Earley & Associates

2
Robin Macrae, B.A., M.B.A., J.D.
•  Robin is an information architect and
content developer specializing in content
strategies and applications in large
enterprises
•  In addition to enterprise IT, his background
includes management consulting, business
law, and marketing
•  He is an expert in authoring workspace, the
SharePoint ECM and WordPress CMS
•  He has recently added enterprise search to
his information architecture practice and is
developing his expertise in SharePoint 2013
and its game-changing search capabilities
•  LinkedIn robinmacrae
•  Twitter @Robin_Macrae
•  workspacebuilders.com
•  Robin.Macrae@Earley.com

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American Greetings’ site

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About excerpts
•  For more than 100 years, American Greetings Corporation (NYSE: AM)
has been a creator and manufacturer of innovative social expression
products that assist consumers in enhancing their relationships to create
happiness, laughter and love.
•  The Company's major greeting card lines are American Greetings, Carlton
Cards, Gibson, Recycled Paper Greetings and Papyrus, and other paper
product offerings include DesignWare party goods and American Greetings
and Plus Mark gift-wrap and boxed cards.
•  American Greetings also has one of the largest collections of greetings on
the Web, including greeting cards available at Cardstore.com and
electronic greeting cards available at AmericanGreetings.com.
•  In addition to its product lines, American Greetings also creates and
licenses popular character brands through the American Greetings
Properties group. Headquartered in Cleveland, Ohio, American Greetings
generates annual revenue of approximately $1.6 billion, and its products
can be found in retail outlets worldwide.

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About American Greetings
•  Leading manufacturer of greeting cards and other
social expression products
•  Americangreetings.com site and retail businesses
•  eCards a new product category
•  Paper cards move to digital art has changed the
creative process significantly, need to update
business processes and tools
•  Business more complex, global
•  Acquisitions of companies, processes, products,
etc.
5

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The mission and objectives
The mission
•  Provide an enterprise digital asset management system solution that would
administer and leverage its IP and assets
Objectives
•  Organize, manage and maintain worldwide digital content
•  Increase awareness and use of existing assets
•  Content quality, metadata consistency and increased speed to market

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Keys to understanding
•  Silo’d systems and metadata are a natural phenomenon akin to tribes
within a federation
•  Metadata is about a seeing and understanding in a common or shared way
amongst people, departments, divisions and enterprises
•  That understanding is the result of a common mental model built from
shared language
•  Addresses existing requirements and brings new capabilities difficult to
internalize and utilize but of great potential enterprise value
•  Inevitably, this kind of development requires process change and that is a
primary source of project complexity, cost and uncertainty
•  Primary value of this case today:
!  change in a large enterprise is achievable
!  modeling of structures and processes
!  much of change isn’t visible once implemented (infrastructure)

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The larger scope
Enterprise Digital Asset Management
Workflow
Initiations
Auto verify
Specification
Licensing
Restrictions
Desktop Tools
Define
Program
Define
Specs
Search
Art & Copy
Create
New
Design
Product
Analytics
Product Lifecycle Management
Conceive Develop Realize Use

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Project goals in metadata and taxonomies
•  Develop a common, controlled vocabulary across multiple business areas,
tools and functions
•  Enable governance of key attributes that drive our business
•  Improve findability of assets (browse & search)
•  Facilitate asset repurpose and reuse

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Occasions
Anniversary
Birthday
Baby
Holidays
Recipients
Feminine
Aunt
Planning
Product
Database
DAM
Art Techniques
3D
Airbrush
Dimensional
Graphic
Occasions
Anniversary
Birthday
Baby
Holidays
BI
Consistency across systems
Manuf.
Fold Type
French Fold
Z Fold
Gate Fold
Oval

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Metadata chaos
•  Taxonomies in use but a spaghetti mess of metadata fields and conflicting
vocabularies for the same content

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Example: Occasion
System 1: PDB Linelist (Planning)
System 2: MDL (Manufacturing)
System 3: IAU (Art Storage)

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Example: Occasion
•  An occasion is also part of a concept called “major caption” which identifies
the heading of the card
•  And it’s called “intent” by the Editorial folks

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Example: Occasion
•  And on the web, it’s also completely
different…
•  Mixing concepts:
!  Features
!  Tone
One result — good business intelligence
nearly impossible for both web/digital
assets and paper

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Data flow – current view

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Fixing the problem:
Conceptual domain model

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Lots of business units involved
•  Each group had different issues
!  Different timelines
!  Different terminology
!  Battling old ways of working
!  Different workflows
Editorial
Creative
Manufacturing
Business
Intelligence
Legal
Merchant Team
Fulfillment Library Global

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Difficulty changing paradigms
Value of faceted approach (post-coordinated) vs. pre-coordinated
Pre-coordinated
Birthday Feminine
Birthday Masculine
Birthday Funny
Birthday Juvenile
Birthday Romantic
Post-coordinated
Occasion
Birthday
Wedding
Halloween
Tone
Funny
Romantic
Heartfelt
+
Caption = BDY FATHER FRM DAUGH
Occasion
= Birthday
Recipient
= Father
Sender
= Daughter

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Definition | pre-coordination vs. post-coordination I
•  Pre-coordination is the combining of elements into one heading in
anticipation of a search on that heading
•  Post-coordination is the assignment of elements to separate headings, in
anticipation of a user combining them at the time he or she looks for
materials in a catalog, usually through keyword searching
•  Source http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/pre_vs_postupdate.pdf

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Definition | pre-coordination vs. post-coordination II
•  Source Corc: New Tools and Possibilities for Cooperative Electronic
Resource Description edited by Karen Calhoun, John J. Riemer

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Combinatorial power
Occasion
Target document:
Occasion = Birthday
Tone = Funny
Recipient = Daughter
Tone
Recipient
Just three nodes with 5 terms each could have 3 to the 5th
power (243) possible combinations

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Different perspectives
•  User interface requirements
!  How do users want to navigate and
refine products?
•  Retrieval requirements
!  How to tag content to identify and reuse
components?
!  E.g. Editorial tone (is it funny: dark, absurd,
silly, etc)
•  Business intelligence requirements
!  How to tag content to assess performance?
!  E.g. Sender not an important concept to an
external user for search, but it is for BI: is it
from a mother to a son? Or from a father to
a son? Who is the buyer?
© 200822

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Cross-functional development
Agreeing to a taxonomy framework
EditorialArt
SharedProduct
Art Techniques Art Styles
Subject Matter Subject Matter
Colors
Editorial
Themes
LanguagesTopics
Editorial
Devices
Product
Categories
Product Lines
Lifestyles Programs
Fold Types Paper Types
Product Codes Music Genres
Occasions Licensing
Recipients Senders
Age Groups Tones
Extended
Functions
Asset Types

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Differing levels needed
Different tools may need different views and granularity
Gift Packaging
Gift Packaging: Package Decorations
Gift Packaging: Ribbon
Gift Packaging: Ribbon: Sheer Ribbon
Gift Packaging: Ribbon: Sheen Ribbon
Gift Packaging: Ribbon: Curling Ribbon
Gift Packaging: Ribbon: Fabric Ribbon
Gift Packaging: Bows
Gift Packaging: Bows: Specialty Bows
Gift Packaging: Bows: Poly Bows
Gift Packaging: Bows: Fabric Bows
Gift Packaging: Bows: Curly Bows
Planning Manufacturing

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Metadata development and harmonization
•  Narrowed scope from 218 metadata fields across 11 systems to
102 core fields that were most relevant to the EDAM effort
!  i.e. don’t boil the ocean in phase 1
•  Got agreement on the framework before haggling over values
•  Assigned ownership: giving groups precedence over certain areas
•  In cases of conflict, placed priority on EDAM requirements (since
first out of the gate)

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Taxonomy across the creative process

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Tagging training
Providing clear and detailed training on the taxonomy for core taggers &
searchers
Live training
Supporting
documentation

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Cross-mapping & legacy
•  Ideal: go back & retag all images with new metadata
•  Real: go forward with new structure, cross-map legacy where
possible & retag as items are reused
Old level 1
field (code)
Old level
1 field
value
Old level 2
field (code)
Old level
2 field
value
New facet New level 1 field value New level 2 field value
style_typ_cd CONV Art Styles Traditional
style_typ_cd CUTE Art Styles Cute
style_typ_cd HUMOR Art Styles Funny
style_typ_cd JUVEN Art Styles For Kids
style_typ_cd RELIG Art Styles Religious
style_typ_cd ST/RQ Art Styles Manual Retagging
style_typ_cd TEEN Art Styles Manual Retagging
gnrl_tchn_cd REND spec_tchn_cd AIR Art Techniques Airbrush
gnrl_tchn_cd REND spec_tchn_cd BLACK Art Techniques Line Art
gnrl_tchn_cd REND spec_tchn_cd BLOCK Art Techniques Rendered Print Transfer
gnrl_tchn_cd PHOTO spec_tchn_cd BW/1C Art Techniques Photo Black & White Photo

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The home page

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One of three main categories

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Filters/refiners for “birthday” query

Building a Metadata Infrastructure at American Greetings (taxonomy, faceted search, business process modelling, governance)

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