A Half-Day Workshop That Sparked a Full Engagement: Taxonomy Expertise for Company Z’s Manufacturing Division.

About the Client

Company Z is a major global, research-driven pharmaceutical company. It sells its products in more than 140 countries and operates manufacturing facilities in dozens of countries worldwide. Company Z’s manufacturing division oversees the formulation, packaging, and distribution of its global product portfolio, coordinating supply planning, sourcing, production, and delivery across an interdependent global manufacturing network.

Industry Context

Pharmaceutical companies operate in one of the most document-intensive regulatory and quality environments of any industry: manufacturing procedures, quality records, and regulatory documentation must remain findable, current, and auditable across global operations, and poor findability can directly slow scientific, quality, and compliance work. A well-designed taxonomy is foundational infrastructure for that kind of findability at scale, which is why Company Z’s KM team — despite its own experience — specifically sought outside expertise in taxonomy rather than attempting the work purely in-house. Iknow’s prime contractor on the engagement, CGI, is one of the world’s largest IT and business consulting firms; the fact that a systems integrator of CGI’s scale brought in a specialist firm specifically for deep taxonomy expertise underscores how genuinely specialized that skill set is, even for large, well-resourced organizations.

Current Situation

Company Z’s internal KM team was working on several initiatives to enhance and apply a custom taxonomy across its content, search tools, and project and collaboration workspaces, with the goal of helping Company Z’s scientists and engineers find relevant content more quickly. Recognizing that it lacked in-house taxonomy subject-matter expertise, Company Z invited Iknow to prepare and deliver a taxonomy workshop to support the effort.

• An experienced team missing a specific, deep specialization. Company Z’s KM team was actively running multiple taxonomy-related initiatives but recognized it lacked in-house taxonomy subject-matter expertise. Taxonomy development is often a critical gap that a general KM team cannot fill on its own.
• No external validation of its taxonomy roadmap. Company Z already had a taxonomy development roadmap underway, but it lacked an independent expert perspective on whether it was well-designed or sufficiently forward-looking.
• Highly specific industry classification requirements. Pharmaceutical content classification has distinct best-practice requirements, driven by scientific, regulatory, and manufacturing complexity, that a generic taxonomy development approach would not adequately address.
• A short, high-stakes engagement window. The entire assignment centered on a single half-day workshop delivered to Company Z’s KM team and other internal staff, so the session had to be well prepared and land correctly the first time, with no opportunity for a second attempt.

• Provide a critique of Company Z’s current taxonomy development roadmap.
• Provide guidance on creating a forward-looking taxonomy.
• Provide best practices for classifying content in the pharmaceutical industry.

How Iknow Structured the Work

Iknow structured the engagement around several weeks of preparation — spanning a formal data request, document review, and stakeholder interviews — culminating in a single half-day interactive workshop and a written summary report.

Key Activities & Decisions

• Data Request and Document Review. Several weeks before the workshop, Iknow prepared and submitted a data request for information on Company Z’s existing taxonomies, taxonomy development plans, and the use of text-mining and autoclassification tools. Company Z provided the information, and Iknow reviewed more than a dozen documents, including a current-state assessment of Company Z’s taxonomy development, a description of major taxonomy-related initiatives over the prior five years, Company Z’s future-state KM platform vision, and requirements documentation for that platform.
• Stakeholder Interviews. Iknow identified several Company Z KM team members for interviews, developed a detailed interview guide, and conducted telephone interviews to probe the findings from the data request and gather additional insights into the KM landscape, user satisfaction with the current platform, and potential opportunities for improvement.
• Workshop Agenda Development. Based on the data request and interview findings, Iknow drafted a workshop agenda covering an assessment of Company Z’s existing taxonomies and the methodology for creating and applying them. The agenda included practical deep dives into applying text analysis to identify taxonomy terms, harmonizing taxonomies across disparate business units and departments, merging repositories with similar content, applying new taxonomy terms to existing content, integrating enterprise data into the KM platform, and performing autoclassification using taxonomy and ontology models, followed by next steps. The agenda underwent several rounds of refinement and sign-off with Company Z before delivery.
• Workshop Delivery. Iknow developed presentation materials and several case study examples, then delivered a highly interactive half-day workshop to Company Z’s KM team and other internal staff, drawing on real taxonomies and taxonomy-embedded applications Iknow had built for other clients to make the concepts concrete and credible.
• Written Deliverable. Iknow prepared a 60-page written summary report that includes workshop highlights, a taxonomy development roadmap, and next steps, along with a set of prioritized projects to accelerate Company Z’s taxonomy development and recommendations to enhance content findability and discoverability.

Stakeholders & Collaboration

Iknow worked as a subcontractor to the prime contractor, CGI, coordinating directly with Company Z’s internal KM team throughout the preparation and delivery of the workshop, which was ultimately attended by Company Z’s KM team and other Company Z staff.

Delivering Real Value to a Sophisticated Audience in a Single Session

Building credibility with an already experienced, knowledgeable internal KM team in a single half-day session left essentially no room for a second attempt. Iknow addressed this by investing several weeks of preparation before the workshop — including a formal data request, a review of more than a dozen Company Z documents, and structured stakeholder interviews. This ensured the workshop content was grounded in Company Z’s current state and specific gaps rather than generic taxonomy training. Iknow also used real taxonomies and applications from its own client work to make abstract concepts concrete.

Balancing General Methodology With Pharmaceutical-Specific Requirements

The workshop needed to cover both broadly applicable taxonomy methodology and Company Z’s pharmaceutical-specific classification needs without treating industry best practices as a disconnected add-on. Iknow addressed this by structuring the agenda around practical deep-dive topics — text analysis for term identification, cross-department taxonomy harmonization, repository merging, and ontology-based autoclassification — that let the session move fluidly between general methodology and pharma-specific application throughout.

Operational Outcomes

• Reviewed more than a dozen Company Z source documents during preparation, including five years of taxonomy-related initiative history and Company Z’s future-state KM platform requirements.
• Delivered a single, highly interactive half-day workshop to Company Z’s KM team and other internal staff.
• Delivered a 60-page written summary report that included a taxonomy development roadmap and prioritized next steps.

Strategic and Organizational Outcomes

Company Z’s KM team left the workshop with a clear understanding of how to create a useful taxonomy and to perform text mining and clustering to understand the contents of a repository, along with a set of prioritized projects to accelerate taxonomy development and recommendations to enhance content findability and discoverability. Based on the expertise Iknow demonstrated during the workshop, Company Z asked Iknow to support the enhancement of its custom taxonomy and its incorporation into autoclassification and faceted search applications — expanding a single workshop engagement into ongoing work.

Timeline to Impact

Iknow delivered the full engagement — preparation, workshop, and written report — within a single month, and Company Z’s decision to extend the relationship followed directly from the workshop’s strength, among the fastest engagement-to-expansion outcomes in Iknow’s history.

Core Skills

• Taxonomy strategy & roadmap critique
• Content classification best practices
• KM workshop design & facilitation
• Pharmaceutical / Life Sciences KM advisory

Methods & Frameworks

• Data request and document-based current-state assessment
• Structured stakeholder interview methodology
• Text mining and cluster analysis for taxonomy term identification
• Taxonomy and ontology-based autoclassification

Technologies & Tools

• Text mining and auto-classification tooling
• Taxonomy and ontology modeling approaches