A curious thing about information technology infrastructure: there are known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns.
When it comes to weaknesses in their tech ecosystems, most organizations fall into the third category: the unknown unknowns. Companies don’t know what they don’t have because they haven’t mapped their technology, which breeds inefficiency, siloes knowledge and drives up costs.
What Is Systems Mapping?
In IT, systems mapping takes a holistic approach to visually describing, as simply as possible, how elements in a complex system interconnect to achieve a common goal. It includes visuals of a system’s relationships, feedback loops, actors and trends.
Why Systems Mapping?
While systems mapping is hardly new — in fact, it’s used to study everything from livestock production to the inner workings of the brain — organizations are increasingly using interconnected systems and processes. Learning how to create efficient systems maps has taken on a new sense of urgency.
The problem with using multiple systems, however, is that one system may not be able to talk to another.
A real example of this issue is when a Fortune 500 chief financial officer’s team struggled to consolidate financial data from over 70 systems. They had to painstakingly extract and integrate numbers from multiple places, causing unnecessary friction year after year.
But what if they’d just had a streamlined mapping system in place?
Here are three concrete reasons why you should implement systems mapping in your IT environment.
Systems Mapping Helps You Dig Deeper
One way of looking at systems mapping, or systems thinking, is: “How do we eliminate problems?”
Let’s say you’re a coffee shop owner, and there’s huge turnover with your baristas. Foot traffic is down because customers are waiting too long for their drinks, and when they do receive their drinks it’s not what they ordered. Your knee-jerk reaction might be to simply hire more baristas — but that’s expensive and can take a long time.
Now shift your mindset, dig deeper and ask yourself why employees are quitting. That’s the problem you have to solve before going on another hiring spree.
Systems mapping facilitates this mindset shift by illustrating a top-down view for leaders who want to understand the efficiency or even inefficiency of their systems. This includes the technologies, information and human factors. By implementing a systems map, organizations are able to go layers deeper than most are used to.
Mapping Simplifies Complex Technology
We work with large employers to ensure their talent staffing meets the needs of their business. We’ve found that technology has done a wonderful job in the human resources domain, creating personalized experiences and automating busy work.
But with the introduction of personalization and automation has come a Frankenstein’s monster of technologies. In the HR world, we usually see a disorganized mess between systems used to hire and acquire talent and those used to retain and promote employees internally. There will often be one set of technologies for recruiters and hiring managers, and another set for talent management.
The map is a confusion of up and down arrows with no discernible rhyme or reason. Most organizations use multiple types of technology in a system.
Mapping, however, can help consolidate all of them visually for a simple frame of reference, streamlining processes. If a retailer needs to attract and hire cashiers, for example, the map will display a straight line showing who can start right away and what shifts they can fill so the store is optimally staffed.
Mapping Identifies What’s Missing
The day is coming when companies will eventually offer even more decision-making tools, such as warning flags that show gaps in the system and points indicating where they can make improvements.
The goal is to understand how systems and people are interacting and point out what’s missing — the unknown unknowns. Then, you’re ready to scale. Imagine how much more efficient an organization could become if it could pinpoint exactly where it needs help.
For example, can GenAI plug a hole by writing job descriptions and other content? Can a healthcare provider use the same system to hire surgeons and x-ray technicians? Can a task like job interview scheduling, which normally takes hours, evolve into an automated intelligent experience that makes the problem disappear?
A systems map can help leaders see these gaps, which is the pivotal first step of positive change.
3 Tips for Implementing Systems Maps
If nothing else, leaders should understand three things about improving information flows.
- Get the right stakeholders together and give them time to do the work. Systems mapping is an inherently messy undertaking but worth the value.
- Get started. Dive in without hesitation. This isn’t a waterfall exercise, it’s agile and iterative. It’s also OK to be wrong. The goal is not to be perfect right away, it’s to get better over time.
- Make it actionable. Most system maps sit untouched on a desktop because they lack concrete next steps. Identify the first problem and apply a solution. Then quickly iterate and move to the next problem.
These three tips will help organizations understand their human factors, technology and business priorities and tie them all together.
Nothing beats knowing what you don’t know.
