Mapping System with Attributes

Posted by Chris Murtland
Jun 17, 2021 at 04:56 PM

Hey Matt,

Not sure so much about the visual aspect, but any tool that provides some version of clones (Workflowy, BrainStorm, Ultra Recall) seems to get one part of the way to an overall map, in that “data source 123” can show up as the responsibility of a person or department, and also show up as a requirement for “process A” as well as “process B.” As I’m typing this, I wonder if TheBrain might be worth a try, since it’s more visual and you can actually label the connections between items…

Also, I’d recommend the book “Work the System” by Sam Carpenter. It’s about how he installed standard operating procedures in his company - which may be obvious enough, but I thought his approach of having the people doing the work document their own processes plus the fact that any procedure could be changed rapidly without a lot of bureaucracy was pretty interesting. He has a generally non-holistic approach, believing that optimizing individual sub-systems is more important than even comprehending the overall system. For example, a car requires a working engine, but the overall functionality of the car is not really related to the inner workings of the engine (the engine can be a black box sub-system).

As to the actual business data, I think having a centralized, canonical data source that can be accessed and used by multiple processes without changing the storage format makes everything less fragile. I like relational databases sitting on a server for that purpose, but Notion now has an API, so I imagine it could serve the same purpose with some ingenuity.