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Mapping System with Attributes
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Posted by MadaboutDana
Jun 17, 2021 at 07:11 AM
Sounds like you ought to take a look at Notion (notion.so), especially if you want all members of the company to be able to contribute.
It’s deceptive: Notion can be as complex as you want it to be, but is also good for mapping things out.
Posted by Cyganet
Jun 17, 2021 at 11:32 AM
MadaboutDana wrote:
Sounds like you ought to take a look at Notion (notion.so), especially
>if you want all members of the company to be able to contribute.
>
>It’s deceptive: Notion can be as complex as you want it to be, but
>is also good for mapping things out.
I was just looking a Notion for a different use case and realised that it could work for this as well. Notion pages can have properties, you can organise them in tables, boards, lists and galleries, and you can even create relational links between pages. See: https://www.notion.so/Relations-rollups-fd56bfc6a3f0471a9f0cc3110ff19a79
Posted by Matt Harwood
Jun 17, 2021 at 03:54 PM
Firstly, thank you so much for every reply and idea - I am very, very grateful for all your responses!
I am kicking myself but forgot to mention - what I’m looking for would need to be either Windows-based or in a browser, and *ideally* wouldn’t lock me in too much to a platform.
From the replies so far, I’m definitely intending to take a close look at Flying Logic, Notion and Freeplane. Any further suggestions are obviously encouraged!
Not to fly too far off topic, it seems a far more common stage of a company’s life than is often thought of - too big for remembering everything, too small for a corporate culture of documenting everything.
Thank you again everyone!
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.
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Jun 17, 2021 at 06:19 PM
I am not quite sure if you’re saying you need something that automates these processes, or just visualizes them for you and your team. If the latter, you might take a look at TheBrain. See this video as a possible use case:
https://thebrain.com/apps/operations
Steve