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Quantity AND Quality

September 16, 2010 by Barbara Inge Karsch

In If quantity matters, what about quality? I promised to shed some light on how to achieve quantity without skimping on quality. In knowledge management, it boils down to solid processes supported by reliable and appropriate tools and executed by skilled people. Let me drill down on some aspects of setting up processes and tools to support quantity and quality.

If you cannot afford to build up an encyclopedia for your company (and who can?), select metadata carefully. The number and types of data categories (DCs), as discussed in The Year of Standards, can make a big difference. That is not to say use less. Use the right ones for your environment.

Along those lines, hide data categories or values where they don’t make sense. For example, don’t display Grammatical Gender when Language=English; invariably a terminologist will accidentally select a gender, and if only a few users wonder why that is or note the error, but can’t find a way to alert you to it, too much time is wasted. Similarly, hide Grammatical Number, when the Part of Speech=Verb, and so on.

Plan dependent data, such as product and version, carefully. For example, if versions for all your products are numbered the same way (e.g. 1, 2, 3,..), it might be easiest to have two related tables. If most of your versions have very different version names, you could have one table that lists product and version together (e.g. Windows 95, Windows 2000, Windows XP, …); it makes information retrievable slightly simpler especially for non-expert users. Or maybe you cannot afford or don’t need to manage down to the version level because you are in a highly dynamic environment.

Enforce mandatory data when a terminologist releases (approves or fails) an entry. If you  decided that five out of your ten DCs are mandatory, let the tool help terminologists by not letting them get away with a shortcut or an oversight.

It is obviously not an easy task to anticipate what you need in your environment. But well-designed tools and processes support high quality AND quantity and therefore boost your return on investment.

On a personal note, Anton is exhausted with anticipation of our big upcoming event: He will be the ring bearer in our wedding this weekend.

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Filed Under: Advanced terminology topics, Designing a terminology database, Producing quality, Producing quantity, Return on investment, Setting up entries, Terminologist, Tool Tagged With: data category, ISO 12620, ISOcat

Comments

  1. Sue Kocher says

    September 17, 2010 at 7:33 am

    Juggling quality and quantity continues to be a challenge for us. We’re now figuring out which fields we should hide, which fields we can hide, and how to ease the job of entering terminology data for all parties involved. Thanks for the insights, Barbara.

    And best wishes for your upcoming wedding!! How exciting, and how cool that you are including your best friend! My kind of person. 🙂
    Sue

    Full-time Terminologist
    Part-time dog[-owner] trainer

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