Monday, September 08, 2014

Data points for mapping ...

The mapping technique I describe (known as Wardley Mapping) is not widely used, in fact usage is quite rare. However, seeing that I made the technique creative commons many many years ago - I don't actually know how many people are using it.

Of those that I do know then I have numerous examples on impact e.g. :-

1) Estimated reduction in cost of an entire project by 30%

2) Reduction in cost of individual project transactions between 99.3% and 99.6%.

3) Identification of new opportunities and successful funding of new business to exploit this (around $70M raised in total).

4) Increase in market share in an emerging field from 5% to 70% with minimal (sub $1M) investment.

5) Identification and removal of project risks for large scale projects (in excess of $100M).

The problem of course is that "numerous" isn't the vast number of examples I need. Even the examination of high tech companies on strategic play (see figure 1) only covers 160 high tech companies.

Figure 1 - High Tech companies, Strategic Play vs Action


Now mapping has a reasonably solid base in terms of the research on evolution. But unlike the evolution work, it lacks the many thousands of data points that I require to confidently say (to my satisfaction) what the impact of mapping is to most organisations. The signs all look encouraging but that's not enough. I like my work to be backed by large volumes of supporting evidence as opposed to handfuls or a few hundred. I'm not into the "this company did A and is successful, so you should do A too" world of backward causality.

I don't obviously expect to get this data anytime soon - it'll be a very slow road (i.e. 10 -15 years). However, if you are using mapping then please take a short amount of time to jot down the impacts (positive, negative and no impact) and ping me.