Every so often nonprofit professionals ask me for advice about how to arrange electronic files.  I enjoy this, partly because even though I hate filing I love creating and refining taxonomies.(1)

The other reason that I enjoy advising them is that they usually have a first-rate source of data - if not a perfect solution - right in their offices.  This wonderful resource is the system that they currently use for filing paper documents. 

Nonprofit professionals need to ask themselves:

"Is our paper filing system working?  Why or why not?"

These questions should be addressed to the entire staff, but especially to the folks who file documents that they didn't create and the folks who need to retrieve things that they didn't file.  If they can't figure out where a paper document should go, or how to find something that has already been filed, it's important to address that problem before designing an electronic file structure.

If an organization's paper filing system is working, then the staff is in luck:  they can use it as a model for creating an electronic filing system. Nevertheless, it is often the case that staff members are using a very different system for filing paper and electronic documents, even if the two contain the same content.(2) Why should everyone be forced to master a second taxonomy, if the first one is intuitively workable? 


1) This is apparently very consistent with my Myers-Briggs personality type.  These days, people like me can make our mental quirks seem more impressive by nattering on about "knowledge management" and "information architecture."

2) For example, many teams file the paper versions of financial reports together in chronological order, but the individual who created the reports probably saved the electronic files quite differently, with spreadsheets in one folder, graphics in a second, and text in a third.  This may work for that individual, but it's going to a source of grief to his/her colleagues (or successor) if someone needs to reconstruct the complete document, especially if he/she makes no distinctions between drafts and final versions.