Unified Taxonomy for Employee Center

  • Release version: Yokohama
  • Updated January 30, 2025
  • 2 minutes to read
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    Summary of Unified Taxonomy for Employee Center

    Unified Taxonomy is a hierarchical framework in the Employee Center portal that organizes various content types—such as requests, articles, quick links, learning content, and employee communications—into a single, employee-centric browse experience across departments. It plays a central role in enhancing how employees discover and interact with content related to IT, HR, Legal, Workplace, and Procurement services.

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    Key Features

    • Content Taxonomy (Data Model): Defines the top-three levels of topics (e.g., IT > Hardware > Printers) that serve as the structural backbone for mapping content.
    • Content Authoring (Taxonomy Management): Enables content managers and contributors to tag and manage content within the taxonomy.
    • Taxonomy for Employee Content: Maps default content from IT, HRSD, Legal, and other departments into the taxonomy, covering multiple content types.
    • Delivered via ServiceNow AI Platform: Consists of two components—a default Content Taxonomy application (included for all customers) and an Employee Experience Taxonomy plugin (available from the ServiceNow Store) that adds default content mappings.

    Implementation Steps

    • Download and install the Employee Experience Taxonomy plugin to access default content mappings aligned with your licensed products and services.
    • Clone the default employee content taxonomy to customize topics and terminology to your organizational needs.
    • Associate all existing and new content with the cloned taxonomy topics, ensuring consistent classification.
    • Configure user criteria to manage topic-level security and visibility, controlling access based on roles or groups.
    • Update search configurations to filter content according to the taxonomy, improving content discoverability.

    Why This Matters

    By implementing Unified Taxonomy, ServiceNow customers can create a seamless, cross-departmental content experience tailored for employees. This enhances content discoverability, ensures consistent categorization, and enables targeted access control, ultimately improving employee engagement and satisfaction with the Employee Center portal.

    Unified Taxonomy is a collection of hierarchical topics that brings together different content types, such as requests, articles, quick links, learning content, and employee communications.

    In the Employee Center portal, you can use this capability to span across departments to provide a single employee-centric taxonomy. Unified Taxonomy sits at the core of the browse experience in Employee Center. Set up the Unified Taxonomy to leverage the full potential of the browse experience.

    Curated experiences for Employee Center portal

    The Unified Taxonomy is built on these models.
    • Content taxonomy (Data model): Provides the data model or the framework against which the content is mapped. This is the top-three levels of the topic. For example, IT > Hardware > Printers.
    • Content Authoring (Taxonomy management): Provides content managers and contributors the ability to tag content against the taxonomy and manage the taxonomy.
    • Taxonomy for employee content: Is the actual content mapped to the taxonomy. This provides the mapping to the default content shipped by IT, HRSD, and Legal into the content taxonomy.

    Representation of the taxonomy layer

    The Unified Taxonomy capability is delivered by ServiceNow AI Platform as two separate plugin and application.
    Content Taxonomy
    The application that provides the data model or the topic hierarchy and the taxonomy management (content authoring) capabilities for the Unified Taxonomy.
    This application is available by default to all customers.
    Employee Experience Taxonomy
    The plugin that provides the mapping of all the default content for IT, HR, Workplace, Legal, and Procurement into the default content taxonomy. The content types mapped by default are requests, articles, quick links, learning content, and employee communications. Once the plugin is downloaded, this mapping will be visible as part of the content taxonomy app in the platform.
    To get the default taxonomy for employee content, you must download it from ServiceNow Store. On installation, the default content taxonomy displays the available list of topics prescribed for the product or services based on what you are licensed to, such as IT, HR, WSD, PSM, or Legal.
    After you complete the installation, perform the following to achieve a Unified Taxonomy experience.
    • Clone the employee content taxonomy and make appropriate additions or modifications to the provided topic structure. Taxonomy is updated to reflect the terminology and available services. For more information, see Clone taxonomy for employee content.
    • Associate all the existing and new content to the cloned taxonomy topics. For more information, see Create and associate topics.
    • Enable user criteria to configure topic-level security and visibility settings for topics. For more information, see Enable user criteria for topics.
    • Update the search configurations to filter based on the content associated to the cloned taxonomy.