As you said, a purely human taxonomical approach to tagging is almost always doomed to fail. While using a hybrid approach is usually the right answer for an organization, I think the difficulty is in finding the balance between automated, human, centralized and decentralized (folksonomy-type) tagging.

Another major part of the challenge is managing vocabularies that attempt to encapsulate the language of an organization — that’s a whole lot of stuff to have to manage. One of the other advantages of using anecdotal narrative is that language can be introduced to people in a way that ‘indoctrinates’ (I’m trying to make it not sound scary ) people into the people within the organization’s way of viewing the world.

A big thanks for your comment and providing the link to what I’m sure will be an interesting read.

I actually just published an ebook on the subject and have been observing organizations who are taking this approach who have seen some real benefits. In the ebook I offer some suggestions on how to approach what you have called a ‘shared narrative’ from a tagging perspective that continuously leverages both the controlled vocabulary that has been created as part of the organization’s knowledge domain as well as the employees own dynamic ‘shared language’.

We tried to make the subject fun to read in a ‘cook-book’ format so that it is easily ‘digestible’!. You can download the ebook here: http://solutions.dowjones.com/cookbook