Our role
Design the information architecture with the people who have to live in it, put it to them for challenge rather than sign-off, and train the habits that make it hold.
The brief
Every organization has one source of truth. Most of them have several.
An organization operating across multiple country offices accumulates documents faster than it accumulates agreement about where they belong. Programs, research, finance, human resources, and procurement each develop their own conventions. Files travel as email attachments and settle on personal laptops and external drives, which means the current version is whoever’s inbox you happened to open, and the organization’s memory is distributed across hardware it does not control. Nobody can say with confidence what the latest draft is, and access is governed by who was on the thread rather than by anyone’s policy.
Siren works across four country offices on public sector reform, some of it under restricted access. For an organization like that, information architecture is not administrative housekeeping. Knowing where a document lives, who can open it, and which version is current is a governance requirement — and the failure mode is not inconvenience but disclosure.
What we did
Designed the structure with the teams, not for them.
A fifteen-month engagement delivered on Microsoft 365 and SharePoint Online, so the organization carried no servers, no maintenance burden, and no backup regime of its own. The design workshop came early — about five weeks in — and everything after it was rollout, migration, and the slow work of making new habits hold.
01 / Structure
Built the architecture as a reusable pattern, then fitted it to each office
The design began as a functional template — a root site with distinct workspaces for program management, research and evaluation, finance, human resources, procurement, training, office administration, and the executive function — and was then instantiated per country office rather than imposed as a single flat structure. That distinction matters for a multi-country organization: shared conventions, local ownership.
02 / Govern
Made permission a design decision rather than an afterthought
Access was modeled in three tiers — full control, contribute, and view only — assigned by group rather than by individual, so that changing what someone can see is a matter of moving them between groups rather than editing dozens of documents. Restricted areas were designed in from the start for material that genuinely required them. Version history replaced duplicate copies, so a document has one location and a traceable past rather than five near-identical siblings.
03 / Convene
Ran the workshop where the teams designed their own areas
Five weeks into the engagement, on October 20, 2020, ISEET ran a three-hour design workshop with around ten members of the Jordan team. It was not a demonstration. The proposed architecture was put to the room for challenge rather than approval, and teams then worked in groups to design the structure of their own areas — because a filing structure imposed on people is a filing structure they work around.
The remainder of the session covered the working practices the system depends on: how the team site, personal storage, collaboration workspaces, and task planning relate to one another, and where each type of material belongs. The stated goal was blunt — eliminate storing and sharing work on personal computers and external drives.
04 / Standardize
Wrote the conventions down
Naming conventions were agreed and documented — consistent, short and descriptive, ordered from general to specific, dated unambiguously, versioned. This is the least glamorous deliverable in the engagement and one of the most consequential, because search only works on what was named predictably, and an organization that never agrees its conventions rebuilds this problem every two years.
A filing structure imposed on people is a filing structure they work around. So the teams designed their own, inside a pattern that held them together.
ISEET information architecture lead
Outcome
Still the organization’s working environment, five years on.
Siren moved from files on personal laptops and external drives to a single governed environment: documents held once with version history rather than copied, access assigned by group against a defined policy, restricted material genuinely restricted, and a shared naming convention that makes search work. Country offices share a common architecture while owning the structure of their own workspaces.
The environment designed in 2020 remains in use today. For a system whose entire purpose was to change where people put their work, that is the only outcome measure that counts.
5
Years in continuous use since delivery
4
Country offices on one architecture
8
Functional workspaces designed
Systems like this fail on adoption rather than on configuration. A structure people did not help design is one they route around within a quarter, and the organization quietly returns to attachments and personal drives. Five years of continuous use is the evidence that the design workshop and the naming conventions — the two least glamorous parts of the engagement — were the parts that mattered.
October 20, 2020 — three hours, ~10 participants
Microsoft 365 · SharePoint Online
Reusable functional template, instantiated per country office
Three tiers, assigned by group
Considering something similar?
If your organization cannot say where the current version of a document is, the problem is rarely the software.
Related work
Civil Society & Protection
CBO Digital Maturity Assessment — Jordan
An ICT, competency, and process audit for a community-based organization — same contracting client, different problem.
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October 20, 2020 — three hours, ~10 participants
Microsoft 365 · SharePoint Online
Reusable functional template, instantiated per country office
Three tiers, assigned by group
The platform behind this
Immunify is a product, not a bespoke build: six modules covering stock, cold chain, temperature, workforce, learning, and reporting.