Does your organization use a document hierarchy or document sequencing approach?

Prof. Dr. Diler Aslan

In the digital age, being systematic is crucial when designing your website.

Your website will be questioned about whether it is "user-friendly".

This means that your customer or user accessing your website can easily find what they are looking for and benefit from its content.

Hierarchy or ordering is important on a website. In fact, it has always been important in every field. In the digital age, it has become inevitable.

Some of the basic logical approaches to hierarchy or ordering are:

1. Alphabetical sorting
2. Semantic ordering
3. Chronological order

If there is no alphabetical order, your website maturity score will be negatively affected in terms of "user-friendliness".

Semantic or logical ordering is based on context. For example, you are going to start a business. What should your first action be? Which legal regulations should you comply with? You must find answers to these questions. You should act according to the hierarchy of norms.

Figure 1. Norms and their hierarchy (2017 Constitution and previous ones)

It is beneficial to be familiar with all the legal regulations and norms related to your work. When you access the website where the legislation is published, you will often find a hierarchical arrangement of norms, as observed in Figure 1. However, a system or mapping that starts from the highest norm and goes down to the lowest related norm is rarely encountered. For example, a system or mapping that links laws, statutes, regulations, or bylaws according to a hierarchy is not found.

How is the situation at your organization?

Figure 2. Corporate document hierarchy (Medical Laboratory Management Example).

Your website mostly contains documents like those in Figure 2. You can create a document map. In this map, documents can be linked from top to bottom. A system can be created where a single document can be accessed with a single click.

This way, anyone accessing your website can easily find it, and when you need to make changes to a document, you only need to modify that single document.

Chronological ordering is also very important. You should clearly define your policy on this as well. Internet search engines allow access to different versions of the same document. If it's unclear which document is active, your "user-friendliness" score will decrease.

“The term "digital transformation" is widely used. However, its success depends on numerous and diverse factors. Document sharing policies are one of the most important of these factors…

Ensuring document hierarchy and achieving user-friendliness scores in this regard are important…

A systematic approach is at the heart of the matter…

Wishing you a life filled with health, love, and respect…

The author's work in this field includes: Clinical laboratory management at SSK hospital, management, presidency, and directorship positions at the university, Director of Pamukkale University Quality Management and Data Evaluation (KAVDEM) Application and Research Center. TÜRKAK ISO 15189 Auditor. External Evaluator for Higher Education.

Further details can be found in the book “Process-Based Management: Are You Ready for Digital Transformation?” Nobel Academic Publishing. Ankara.

17.02.2025