Every business needs to be organized. Though that sounds like a no-brainer, there are plenty of operations that are far from efficient and have done nothing about it.

While taking the time to actually get your business's data in order is important, it might suit you best to take the time to figure out the actual purpose of organizing your work, according to an article for INC.com by John Baldoni, president of executive coaching firm Baldoni Consulting.

Some business leaders can immediately explain the reasoning behind their organization, but he said that's because they have a clear vision, mission and value set.

Through his research, he found that it's those three elements that lead to effective business structure. In his piece, Baldoni laid out how management should go about reflecting on those three fundamentals before they come up with a final plan.

♦ In order to figure out what the business's vision should be, it's important to know exactly what it would like to see itself eventually become. "Vision emerges from the sense of purpose," he wrote. "It forms the why, but it also embraces the future as in 'to become' the best, the most noted, the highest quality, or the most trusted."

♦ The mission should be simple to figure out, since that's exactly the service a business is providing. Balboni said, for example, a hospital's mission is to care for and help ill patients.

♦ Values, however, are the backbone of the entire business. He wrote that the vision and mission couldn't be carried out if they aren't held together with a strong set of morals.

Once you've figured out these three rudiments, you can then figure out how to effectively organize your business. If your business's productivity was lagging because of old, hard-to-use databases, it would be smart to discuss your newly discovered purposes for organization with a FileMaker consultant. Based on your specific needs, a FileMaker developer may be able to build custom database software that's easy to access and update, and could streamline your operation.