As mentioned in our previous blog, the relentless pace of modern business has increasingly made organization chart maintenance a real headache for administrators.

A lot of companies try to maintain accurate organization charts using tools like Microsoft Visio or Microsoft PowerPoint, effectively creating and updating these charts by hand.

This approach is time-consuming in the extreme – the task of moving and trying to line up boxes alone can seem endless! Adding, removing and transferring or updating people’s profiles within a large organization can become a task almost impossible to keep up with and one open to human error.

And as businesses are dynamic and ever-changing these manually administered charts are, more often than not, out of date before they are even published.

The harsh reality today is that tools like Visio and Powerpoint are great applications BUT they are just not designed to manage complicated organization charts at scale.

It is also the case that many HR systems will contain an “Org Chart” module. While these can provide a functional and quicker way of producing a graphical organization chart, they are normally targeted at the HR professional only and are not well suited to distributing the charts to a wider audience.

Inevitably, the HR system will also contain a lot of confidential information, for example salaries, that you do no want to accidently leak onto the organization chart. There’s nothing more nerve-wracking for a system admin that potentially exposing this kind of data to a public platform.

In addition, there are commercial reasons why this kind of solution may not make sense. This is because HR systems are often licensed “Per Seat”, meaning that giving access to the whole organization can be a costly affair.

Whether produced using a standard application like Visio or by using a HR system, that problem of sharing applies to both. Once created the chart needs to be distributed internally, often by email, or simply uploaded onto a company intranet where it will vie for attention amongst the hundreds of other documents.

A lot of hard work can go in to creating and maintaining a chart that lies unused and unforgotten, its potential as a business asset remaining untapped.

So, what’s the solution? Read our guide below to find out.