Hi David - great question, a properly structured well-organized system is the foundation of an efficient operation, and ideally you can accomplish that with as little effort as possible.

While the Surveyor tree UI itself does not provide specific tools or capabilities tailored towards that, I believe that standard DataMiner Automation can help you a lot.

But before you get started, it is probably best to define clear workflows and a well-defined methodology for onboarding & organizing elements in your system.  Things that come to mind:

• if you have an existing external inventory and asset management solution, it might be worth to considering integrating that, so that this single source of truth is driving everything, including the elements in DataMiner and how they are organized in views.  If you haven't, of course everything can be organized in DataMiner natively.
• naming conventions for elements are very important, and it is advisable to have a good structure for that (e.g. including acronyms for type of device, location, team it belongs to if applicable, service it is used for (in case it is dedicated to a specific service), main or backup resource, etc.).  With a good naming convention, anybody can easily understand which element they are dealing with.
• elements can indeed be organized in views, and one element can be added to multiple views if desirable (e.g. the same element could be a in view that has all the resources at a specific location, while it is also in another view that has all the resources that belong to a specific team).
• elements can also have custom properties, and this can help you to further streamline the way the system is organized in a more automated manner.  Customer properties can be created for anything you want (e.g. a team designation, location, rack, rack position, etc.)
• note that we have a solution called IDP, which offers a standard set of custom properties for location, room, rack, rack position, etc.  - if you would consider those properties, I would be best to leverage IDP as you would benefit from things like standard automated rack views and more of that.
• and of course, there are also so-called services - which are essentially more dynamic collections of elements (i.e. there are a variety of ways to create services in a dynamic fashion, so that specific elements (or parts thereof) are included or excluded from them based on rule sets).

Back on topic, I have seen how users for example leverage automation in DataMiner to automatically check if newly added elements have a name that complies with the naming convention that was defined.  This way, they can maintain the flexibility of having many people with the right to add elements, while being sure that everybody sticks to the naming convention agreed upon.  An automation script like that can run automatically on a schedule (e.g. performing a check each 24 hours), or can be triggered immediately when a new element is created (i.e. when a new element is created, an information message it generated, which can be picked up with the correlation engine to then trigger the automation script that checks the compliance with the naming convention for elements - and of course notify somebody if that check fails).

In a similar way you can have also automation scripts that automatically add or remove elements from specific views, and/or create new views on the fly where elements can be added also automatically.  Again, those scripts could start automatically based on a time schedule, or based on an event happening in the system (e.g. a new element that was created), or because it was triggered manually by somebody (e.g. a button in a Visual Overview UI).  In our internal demo / lab platform we had a problem with people creating elements for all kinds of test and trials, without bothering putting those in a specific view, which resulted in a cluttered root view.  An automation script was used to move those elements automatically into a Staging view for example.

An automation could move / add elements to specific views (if necessary, create also new views) based on their name or for example based on the value of a specific custom properties, etc.  Again, it would be recommended to have a well-defined workflow first before something like this is implemented in the first place.

Not sure if any of this was what you were looking for, but I hope it might help.