• Corporate portals
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• Look them in the eye
   Include portraits in statements

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• Corporate image management
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• Organisational overviews
   Organograms work on web sites?
   >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

• Quick ones
   Collected advice boxes

I could not resist the temptation to publish a diagram outlining my organisation, a so-called organogram, on my web site.
Neither, it appears, can thousands and thousands of otherwise reputable organisations on their web sites.

At least I have made the effort of publishing a clickable organogram, so users are able to find detailed information about the various levels (...!) of my organisation. For some reason this is quite rare.

Equally rare are the occasions on which users actually want to view such organograms. The vast majority of users I have interviewed don´t care about what an organisation looks like on an organogram, not even job seekers.

A relic
I strongly suspect that this is because the organogram is a relic from the early days of the www era. You know, the time when it was considered acceptable to basically copy your corporate brochure on to the web, and structure your website according to how your organisation was structured, rather than according to what services your web visitors could actually be expected to want from you.

In short, organisations provided pictures of how they saw themselves, complete with titles and departments, instead of looking at things from the user´s point of view.
But few users go “Wow...!” when you reveal to them the fact that your organisation is organised into one or more leaders and one or more groups of people who do things. Its what they do, and how it relates to the user, that matters.

When and when not to publish organograms on external sites
Only if you can produce a truly relevant and informative organogram do I recommend you actually publish one on your external site.
By truly relevant and informative I mean that you must be able to prove that your organogram content actually makes life easier for your users, e.g. because it focuses on a new important (important to the user, that is) branch of your organisation, or because it simply eases the users´ navigation to detailed information levels.
For once, chuck away the tenet that you should also aim to please internal stakeholders when communicating externally. Don´t publish an organogram for their sake, the internal heavy dudes know what the organisation looks like.

Here are two good reasons not to publish an organogram on your organisation´s external web site:

• If your organisation is hierarchical – with a top boss, a couple of slightly lower-level top bosses, some lower-level ordinary bosses, plenty of junior lower-level ordinary bosses, hundreds of lower-lower-level bosses, ... – well, that´s a good reason for not publishing an organogram unless you wish to be interpreted as a somewhat rigid and dinosaurish organisation, rightly or not.
  
  
• If your organisation is flat it won´t be the only one that claims to be, so being flat is not a selling point in itself – and if your organisation really were truly flat, somebody without too much management bias ought to have questioned the decision to publish an organogram in the first place.
   

When and when not to publish organograms on internal sites
So how about publishing organograms on internal web sites, like intranets, corporate portals, etc.?
Fine, it can be a lot more relevant inside the organisation itself, especially if the organisation is geographically dispersed. But remember that ideally people should already know the organisation they are part of, so never give in to the following two arguments for publishing organograms on internal sites:

• “People should know who they refer to” – if people don´t know who they refer to in the first place, you should not spend time on organograms. Rather you should take a really close look on your organisation´s internal structures and audit your internal communication paths.
  
  
• “People should be able to see who they should complain to if people don´t do as they are told” – again, it really isn´t an organogram you want. Again you should take another really close look on your organisation´s internal structures and audit your internal communication paths.