Open almost any company’s Google Drive and you can read its whole history in the mess. Folders named after people who left. Three versions of the same document, none of them trusted. Files owned by a personal account instead of the company. “Ask Sarah, she has it” as a filing system.

It looks like a tidiness problem. It’s really an ownership problem.

Why “who owns this?” is the expensive question

When files are owned by individuals instead of the organisation, every departure becomes a small crisis. When there’s no structure, people re-create documents rather than search for them, because searching doesn’t feel safe. When sharing is ad hoc, access spreads in ways no one can see. None of this shows up on a budget line, but it’s paid for daily — in lost time and quiet risk.

You can tell how a company is run by whether anyone can answer “who owns this folder?” without flinching.

Structure that survives people leaving

The fix in Google Workspace is shared drives done properly — where the organisation owns the content, not whoever happened to create it.

• Shared drives by team and function, so ownership is obvious and survives turnover.
• Access by group, not by name, so it’s easy to see and easy to change.
• A naming convention boring enough that everyone can follow it without thinking.
• External sharing with guardrails, decided once instead of case by case.

It’s mostly a decision, not a project

Cleaning up an established Drive takes some work, but the hard part isn’t technical — it’s deciding, on purpose, how things should be organised and who owns what. Once that decision exists and the structure reflects it, the Drive stops being a liability and becomes something people trust enough to actually use well.

Ownership, structure, clarity. It’s the same answer to most of these problems — and that’s not an accident.