Unified Taxonomy for Employee Center

  • Release version: Zurich
  • Updated July 31, 2025
  • 2 minutes to read
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    Summary of Unified Taxonomy for Employee Center

    The Unified Taxonomy in Employee Center is a hierarchical topic framework that consolidates multiple content types—including requests, articles, quick links, learning materials, and employee communications—across departments to create a single, employee-focused browse experience. It forms the backbone of navigation and content organization within the Employee Center portal, enabling seamless access to relevant information and services.

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    Key Features

    • Content Taxonomy (Data Model): Defines the top-three levels of topic hierarchy (e.g., IT > Hardware > Printers) and serves as the structural framework for mapping content.
    • Content Authoring (Taxonomy Management): Provides tools for content managers and contributors to tag and manage content according to the taxonomy, ensuring consistent classification.
    • Taxonomy for Employee Content: Maps default content from IT, HRSD, Legal, Workplace, and Procurement to the taxonomy including various content types, facilitating integrated employee content delivery.
    • Platform Delivery: Available as two components—the Content Taxonomy application (default for all customers) providing the data model and management tools, and the Employee Experience Taxonomy plugin (downloadable from ServiceNow Store) that maps default employee content into the taxonomy.

    Implementation Guidance

    • Download and install the Employee Experience Taxonomy plugin from the ServiceNow Store to access the default taxonomy for your licensed products (e.g., IT, HR, Legal).
    • Clone the provided employee content taxonomy to customize and update topic structures to reflect your organization’s terminology and service offerings.
    • Associate existing and new content with the cloned taxonomy topics to maintain consistent tagging and discoverability.
    • Configure user criteria to control topic-level security and visibility, ensuring that employees see relevant content based on their role or permissions.
    • Adjust search configurations to filter results based on content associated with the customized taxonomy, enhancing search relevance in Employee Center.

    Benefits for ServiceNow Customers

    By implementing the Unified Taxonomy, ServiceNow customers can deliver a streamlined and cohesive employee portal experience that spans multiple departments and content types. This structured taxonomy enables efficient content management, improves content discoverability, and allows for tailored content visibility, ultimately fostering better employee engagement and support within the Employee Center.

    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.