Finding someone in the organisation

I'm working on an interesting problem today - how to present a list of job functions in a hierarchical way (departmental hierarchy). We have at least four levels of structure, so I could put everyone in the top-level department:

• Dept 1


• Person A
• Person B


• Dept 2


• Person C
• Person D

The trouble with this though is that you can lots of people in few departments.
Another alternative is to put them in their immediate sub-department, but then you have no idea of hierarchy. Of course I could do departments within departments, but then it would look quite confusing. I'm using CSS and DIVs so you click on each top level (Dept 1) in the example above to expand and contract each level.

The best solution would be to classify people, not in their official organisational department, but the department in which people think of them. This would probably end up being a two level departmental structure, but only of my own invention, and needing to be maintained separately. Time to do some research I think...

tags: visualization