Consepsys is often asked: “Is there a standard for filing structures?” or “Is there a standard filing structure in my industry?”
Many Document Control professionals face the daunting question of how to design their filing structure indeed.
First, the answer is no, for one simple reason: the filing structure of an organisation depends on a wide variety of parameters, which are never exactly the same from one organisation to the next.
In a way, you can compare a filing structure to the way furniture, decorative items and fixtures are arranged in a home. Just for fun, let’s try and list out parameters which would influence the arrangement of furniture, decorative items and fixtures in a home:
We could continue this list for dozens of more pages, but that is not the point of this article.
No two homes have exactly the same parameters, therefore no two homes have exactly the same arrangement of furniture, decorative items and fixtures. The same principle applies to filing structures. The parameters involved in the design of a filing structure are of immense diversity.
Let’s list out just a very small sample of those parameters:
- Historical development of the organisation
- Activity sector of the organisation
- Size of the organisation
- Specific activities of the organisation
- Organisational structure / chart
- Culture of the organisation
- Single-location activity or multi-location activity
- Single-national activity or multinational activity
- Preferences of the organisation
- Personality of management team
- Etc.
We could continue this list for dozens of more pages, but that is not the point of this article.
No two organisations have exactly the same parameters, therefore no two organisations have exactly the same filing structure.
There is no standard filing practice, because every company is different and their filing needs are therefore different. For example, a company operating only one office in only one country will not have the same parameters as another company in the same activity sector operating 300 offices in 20 countries.
The specific parameters and the needs of each organisation empirically determine the way in which they file their documents.
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