Chances are, if you’ve ever worked anywhere, you’ve stored something on a network drive. Before the days of portals and dedicated content management systems, the network drive may have been your only option for storage, besides keeping things on your own desktop computer.

As these dedicated content management systems have taken root within most organizations, the question is often asked: what do we do with all that stuff we have sitting on the network drives?

Different organizations have went to different lengths to organize the content on network drives. But really, there’s only one way you can go about organizing that content, and that’s by creating a hierarchical folder structure.

Often, that folder hierarchy is based on the departmental hierarchy — which creates a sort of folder taxonomy via which content is organized. Yet occasionally, people get the urge to start mixing in other facets of the documents into the organizational hierarchy; and this is where things start to get messy.

As you’re probably aware, managing content now relies much more on search engines than it ever did before — and organizing content with accurate metadata ensures that it can be found through search.

However, let’s say we’re in a purely network drive scenario, and we want to organize our content both by content type (forms, presentations, etc.) and by department. The most obvious way to do this would be to create departmental categories (finance, human resources, etc.) and then come up with content type folders beneath those.

But in this scenario, we’re also certainly going to create duplicate folders. Chances are, human resources and finance are both going to have forms. They’re both going to have presentations. So, is it then better to organize by content type and subdivide by department?

And here we run into the real problem: there is no right answer. Department of origin, content type, subject and whatever other metadata we might have about a particular knowledge object (really just a fancy phrase for document most of the time) is just one facet that describes that object. And as far as which facets are important to emphasize, well, that’s a very subjective call.

But the network drive example can teach us something about organizing content. Even in more complex content management systems (take SharePoint for example), content is still being organized into folders. We thus still need to select a primary organizational methodology (department’s usually easiest).

It’s also good to keep in mind that it makes sense to think very carefully about what metadata you’re going to need to find you’re content — and ensure that you’re collecting just the right amount of that metadata, as I said in my last post. It’s much more difficult to go back and fix your organizational structure after the fact.