This article originated as a member question: should the teams responsible for the search function work with people who have taxonomy/metadata skills? To make the argument, she wanted to find out how other companies organize and staff their intranet/Web portal search and taxonomy functions. To help her, we sent an e-mail asking our contacts the following questions:

In Part I, we summarize the responses, most of which support the requestor's position. Two people indicated that technology selection played a primary role in getting search and taxonomy specialists to collaborate. Another noted the importance of a liaison person with both taxonomy and IT background. However, even the most enthusiastic proponents of collaboration lamented the need to constantly sell taxonomy benefits to users and business units (see also "Selling taxonomy: a blind alley?").

A more interesting issue is why this question evoked such an extensive response — and why it needs to be asked in the first place. We think this is because information management in large companies is often technology-focused rather than people-focused. Most employees understand the value of A - Z indexes, directories, tables of contents, searches, and spreadsheets. If your starting point is user productivity and you avoid techie language, are concepts like metadata repositories, taxonomies, and fielded searches really that hard to appreciate?

In Part II, we look for clues about why the issue seems to be a problem for so many people. Three possibilities emerge:

• search and taxonomy teams have different mandates and different short term objectives;
• the connection between the tasks and the bottom line are remote;
• the editorial function, which normally serves as an advocate for readers, is weak.

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