Today's intranet publishing applications require increasingly sophisticated metadata management, information policies, and governance. Many information professionals, especially those working in the "white space" between disciplines, understand this but may have difficulty explaining it to decision makers and colleagues.

Benefits
Our Knowledge Base Rapid Prototyping service helps organizations:

• conceptualize the technical and intellectual infrastructure needed to increase productivity in key research and publishing processes;

• show users and managers exactly how metadata management and information policy can save time and enhance workflow for a specific business process;

• create a task list, schedule, and budget for making agreed upon information infrastructure improvement.

Process
Our rapid prototyping process involves the following steps:

1. Hands-on learn by doing. Team members enroll in one of the Montague Institute hands-on courses, where they describe the content, people, and processes for a specific business need. Then, under the guidance of the instructor, they gather and input the necessary metadata into our Web-based lab. Most teams choose either Creating and using business taxonomies or Integrating taxononies.

2. Demonstration. The team demonstrates the metadata structures they populated (topic hierarchy, A - Z index, thesaurus, controlled vocabulary search) to users and managers. The course instructor reviews the results with team members. How can the metadata be used to reduce costs? How will it metadata be maintained over time? Are additional metadata elements and relationships needed? What are the information policy and strategy implications?

3. Pilot. Using feedback from the demonstration, the Montague Institute creates a custom version of the course lab, where it can be viewed by team members, users, and decision makers.

4. Request for proposal. A formal document that specifies the features, training, documentation, and policy required to implement a production knowledge base (metadata repository) to support corporate publishing and research applications.

5. Implementation. The client can elect to implement the desired functions using in-house developers, a preferred contractor, or Montague Information Technology LLC, a Montague Institute affiliate.