20 Terabytes, Barely Findable: Launching a Taxonomy Program at a UN Health Agency.

About the Client

UNAIDS was created by UN resolution in 1994 and began operations in 1996, headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, where it shares site facilities with the World Health Organization. UNAIDS is the main advocate for accelerated, comprehensive, and coordinated global action on HIV/AIDS. It leads the world’s most extensive HIV epidemiological data collection, publishing the authoritative statistics that inform virtually every major report, policy, and funding decision in the global AIDS response — a response addressing an epidemic that, even today, affects roughly 40 million people living with HIV worldwide. Fulfilling that mission depends on a large, globally distributed staff being able to find and build on each other’s programmatic, technical, and policy work.

Industry Context

International organizations and UN agencies often accumulate enormous, fragmented digital archives spanning multiple storage platforms and decades of country-level, regional, and global program work, and UNAIDS was no exception, with its roughly 20TB of content spread across four different systems. Without a shared taxonomy, that volume of content becomes effectively invisible: staff can’t reliably find prior program evaluations, technical guidance, or policy documents, and institutional knowledge built up over nearly three decades of AIDS-response work risks being duplicated or lost rather than reused. For a mission-driven organization operating on public and donor funding, that inefficiency carries a real opportunity cost — precisely the concern behind UNAIDS executives’ belief that only a small fraction of the organization’s content was in active use. Building internal taxonomy capability, rather than relying indefinitely on outside consultants, also matters more for UN agencies than most organizations, given how frequently staff rotate through postings and how much of the institution’s memory therefore has to live in shared systems rather than individual people.

Current Situation

UNAIDS’ KM team and DTS Department understood that developing a robust custom taxonomy was the first step in organizing, classifying, and making electronic files easily accessible across the organization. In late 2023, UNAIDS released a request for quotations seeking expert guidance in taxonomy design and implementation to create an initial taxonomy for the UNAIDS Secretariat, along with an implementation roadmap outlining the time, budget, and resources required to build a more robust taxonomy. Just as important, the roadmap needed to build the skills within UNAIDS’ own KM staff to implement that plan and keep contributing to taxonomy development. Iknow won the assignment through competitive procurement.

• Enormous, fragmented digital content with low utilization. Roughly 20TB of content was spread across four different platforms — SharePoint Online, OneDrive, the intranet, and Google Drive — with executives believing only a small fraction was actively used.
• No existing taxonomy to organize any of it. UNAIDS had no custom taxonomy to classify content or make it findable across the organization.
• A dual mandate: deliverable and capability. UNAIDS needed both a working initial taxonomy and a KM staff capable of continuing the work independently, not simply a report handed over at the end.
• A lean budget and short timeline for a global organization’s scope. With roughly three months and a modest contract value, the engagement had to be efficient without sacrificing rigor.

• Create an initial custom taxonomy for the UNAIDS Secretariat.
• Deliver an implementation roadmap for building a comprehensive enterprise taxonomy, with time, budget, and resource estimates.
• Build the taxonomy design and development skills of UNAIDS’ KM staff.
• Ground the taxonomy and roadmap in industry best practices and examples from other successful taxonomy projects.

How Iknow Structured the Work

Iknow moved from background review through formal training to hands-on practice: reviewing UNAIDS materials, delivering a structured course, developing a preliminary schema, then running workshops where UNAIDS staff built and tested their own taxonomy before Iknow finalized an implementation plan.

Key Activities & Decisions

• Background review. Iknow collected and reviewed relevant UNAIDS background materials and distributed taxonomy-related articles to the UNAIDS project team ahead of formal training.
• Taxonomy course. Iknow prepared and delivered a three-lecture course on taxonomy design and development, introducing Iknow’s own Findability Framework during the first lecture and using it as the outline for all three sessions.
• Preliminary schema. Iknow developed a preliminary taxonomy schema for UNAIDS based on industry best practices, giving the project team a concrete starting point for the workshops that followed.
• Taxonomy workshops. Iknow prepared and conducted two-hour virtual workshops over Microsoft Teams, assigning each participant an area, business function, or process to build out as their own taxonomy facet, then testing those facets by tagging a batch of representative content and identifying gaps.
• Implementation plan. Iknow prepared an implementation plan for developing a comprehensive UNAIDS taxonomy, including time, budget, and resource estimates for the work ahead.

Stakeholders & Collaboration

Iknow worked directly with UNAIDS’ KM team and Digital & Technology Solutions Department, engaging project team members as active participants throughout the course and workshops rather than passive recipients of a finished deliverable, so the resulting taxonomy reflected genuine input from the people who would maintain it.

Building Durable Internal Capability, Not Just a One-Time Taxonomy

A taxonomy handed over as a finished document risked leaving UNAIDS unable to maintain or extend it once the engagement ended. Iknow addressed this by structuring the work around a formal course built on the Findability Framework, followed by hands-on workshops where UNAIDS staff themselves built and tested taxonomy facets, so the underlying skills stayed with the organization rather than living only in Iknow’s deliverable.

Making an Abstract Taxonomy Concrete Within a Tight Timeline

With roughly three months to work with, there was little room for participants to learn taxonomy theory in the abstract before applying it. Iknow addressed this by having each workshop participant own a specific business area or process and validate their facet in real time by tagging representative content and identifying gaps, turning training and taxonomy-building into the same activity.

Quantitative Outcomes

• Content scale addressed: Roughly 20TB of digital content across four platforms as the target environment for the new taxonomy.
• Training delivered: A 3-lecture course built around Iknow’s Findability Framework.
• Workshops: Multiple 2-hour virtual workshops via Microsoft Teams, each participant building and testing a taxonomy facet.
• Deliverables: An initial enterprise taxonomy plus an implementation roadmap with time, budget, and resource estimates.

Qualitative Outcomes

UNAIDS’ KM team developed a shared understanding and baseline knowledge of the scope and requirements for classifying the organization’s digital content, grounded in industry best practices and examples from other successful taxonomy projects. Because the taxonomy itself was built through the workshops, the deliverable and the capability-building happened simultaneously rather than sequentially — the initial UNAIDS enterprise taxonomy reinforced the skills training rather than existing separately from it. UNAIDS came away with a concrete roadmap it could use to plan, budget, and resource a full enterprise taxonomy buildout across its roughly 20TB of content, rather than an abstract set of recommendations.

Timeline to Impact

Iknow delivered the full engagement — background review, training, workshops, and implementation plan — within the roughly three-month contract period.

Core Skills

• Taxonomy design & development
• KM capability building & training
• Implementation roadmapping
• Workshop facilitation

Methods & Frameworks

• Iknow’s Findability Framework
• Hands-on, workshop-based taxonomy development
• Industry-benchmarked schema design

Technologies & Tools

• Microsoft Teams (virtual workshops)
• SharePoint Online, OneDrive, and Google Drive content environments