Information Architecture — Cross-Team Records
Rebuilding a cross-team SharePoint structure that had no taxonomy, just years of accumulated folders, to make rights and licensing records findable across departments.
Rights and bibliographic governance sat at the center of a lot of other teams' work. Alliance needed our records to negotiate licensing. Platform needed them to know what could go live in which format. Legal and Publisher Relations needed them for their own reasons, on their own timelines. None of those teams could reliably find what they needed.
The problem wasn't competing systems. It was the absence of one. No team — including ours — had ever sat down and designed a taxonomy for these records. Structure had accreted by habit: folders nested by whoever touched them last, naming conventions that made sense for a week and then didn't, no shared logic across drives. This case study covers what that looked like in practice, and what replaced it.
Rights and bibliographic records lived across several shared drives. They were organized by whoever had touched them last. No team had ever designed a taxonomy — structure accreted by habit, not decision.
Alliance managers were, about as often as not, tilling the ground for historical records: rights granted, royalties paid, licensing terms across different forms — PDF, platform-only, and other distribution types. A request followed a fixed relay: the alliance manager emailed our team manager, who emailed a team member, who searched across multiple shared drives, none organized the same way, hoping to land on the right folder by trial and error.
A single structure, organized around what requesters actually needed to know — rights status, licensing period, content type — rather than around whichever internal habit happened to produce a given folder. Sensitive records stayed access-gated, the same as before. What changed was the path to them: routing for those requests became defined instead of improvised. A request went to a named manager, team lead, or senior member, not into a guessing game across drives.
Each handoff — to Alliance, to Platform, to Legal, to Publisher Relations — exposed the same failure: information organized for no one in particular is information no one outside the original team can find. That's a structural problem, not a search problem. No amount of effort spent looking harder fixes a taxonomy that was never designed for the person doing the looking.
The fix wasn't reconciling formats between teams that organized things differently. It was authoring a taxonomy for the first time — one oriented to the question a requester was actually asking, rather than to the sequence in which files happened to get saved.