On mapping: I saw a man he wasn't there

There is a class of maps that plot the things that are not there, that cannot be touched or won't be captured in a single instance. These are maps of information, ideas and organisations; of logical systems of thought, science, business or design; and of change - the mapping of events or actions unfolding over time.

The attraction of mapping intangibles (as opposed to using words or tables to represent them) is that the map can make the relationships of things to one another real and create an intuitive understanding of their dimensions and properties - whether these are concrete, abstract or metaphorical. The graphic language of maps lends itself to representation of the whole of a thing and its parts in a single view, within which we can oscillate rapidly between different levels of detail. Maps allow patterns to emerge and become real, by showing what lies between the visible incidents, artefacts or moments we can otherwise never see.

The importance of mapping intangibles has increased in proportion to the speed of technological and social change. The dematerialisation of products and services and an onrush of excess of choice, facts and demands for our attention results in a disordered and unfamiliar world. In many areas of life the speed of change has created a problem of understanding at the most basic level what things are, what their value is, who they are for and how to use them. What is lacking is any kind of consensual system image of novel objects, organisations or networks. Customers are having difficulty understanding services or product offerings, businesses are changing so rapidly they cannot retain a complete picture of themselves, their operations or of their customers; citizens lack the consistent philosophies or world views that form a foundation for understanding or the information needed to come to a decision. All of us have difficulty understanding the rate and extent of change itself.

As an aside, it is interesting to note that the last period in which mapmaking became a popular medium for reorganising thought was the 16th and 17 Centuries. This was the highpoint of the renaissance and the birth of the modern world, when scientists, alchemists and rosicruceans attempted to resolve in maps and arcane tables the contradictions between the old world of faith and a new world of rational thought. Their cabalistic maps sought to explain an alternative relationship between man and the universe. Our information maps are more prosaic but are just as much an attempt to extract order from the noise of everyday life.

In commerce, it is difficult to move forward with confidence unless you know where you are today. The mapping of businesses as a precursor to strategic change has become a valuable activity in itself, practiced by design companies, IT suppliers and management consultants. The map becomes 'a moment in the process of decision making', a means of possession and control over the enterprise, and a tool for persuasion - part of a business case.

The need to map business has arisen from the rapidly changing boundaries of commerce and the speed of thinking and action required to shift a business back into a competitive position. The rate of change has been driven by a combination of technical development that has automated (or augmented) human activities, and the breakdown of traditional boundaries of business organisation, with a looser arrangements of networks of partnerships and short term contractual arrangements replacing strong vertical integration and permanent employee-employer relationsihps. This looks like a comparatively messy situation, so we map it to find the pattern.

Digital systems promise better business by placing a layer of technology over or instead of traditional business practices. Technology has spawned a blizzard of two- and three-letter acronyms - SCM (Supply chain management), CM (channel management), KM (knowledge management), DSS (digital self service) CED (customer experience design) and CRM (customer relationship management) - each of which requires an understanding of the relationships, processes and dimensions that are affected. A sensible response is to map the existing and desired situation, and then to identify the gaps.

Businesses are not landscapes, but they do have their own geographies. These are comprised of a host of customer, supplier, regulator, partner and internal relationships; of processes with inputs and outputs, nodal points and directions of flow as well as a beginning and end; of numerous domains of competence of different sizes and characteristics, and diverse dimensions by which the nature and state of the business are monitored.

The signs and metasigns devised to map physical geography apply themselves well enough to logical systems. Network diagrams illustrate flow and dependencies, matrices show boundaries and absolute size, distribution maps show positions of entities relative to one other - such as competitive position referenced against selected axes or dimensions, and nested signs can represent hierarchies. Maps are particularly useful in revealing how complex activities such as customer interactions work. Businesses touch their customers in many different ways: different parts of a business may be involved in a particular relationship or transaction which may be mediated over multiple channels - shop, phone, SMS, letter, advertisement, etc. It may critical to a business to understand what is known about a customer at each touchpoint, what value is being exchanged, who the customer is and how they can be characterised usefully and accurately, what is the cost to serve the customer and what is the customer's value over the lifetime of their relationship with the business. The problem is one to which mapping can be applied in order to understand complex patterns of communication and exchange - and to identify contradictory, unwelcome, inefficient or overpriced transactions of whatever kind.

The importance of taxonomy in mapping logical systems, such as this, or when mapping knowledge, cannot be overstated. It is essential to arrive at useful and coherent classifications of things before they can be ordered into their proper place. Inconsistent taxonomy produces a useless map. This is the point, then, at which cartography merges with librarianship and design strategy, and where we arrive at alternatives to standard tabular classifications of books and look instead at pictorial representations of families of information to enable the extraction, viewing and contextual understanding of any kind of symbolic record.

 

From Mapping: An Illustrated Guide to Graphic Navigational Systems by Roger Fawcett-Tang and William Owen