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Shared Meaning
Platform
Enable more meaningful conversations by
integrating conceptual maps and diagrams
with stories and data.
How does it work?
On the surface, the Shared Meaning Platform is a bit like a cross between Google maps and Wikipedia – a web interface that allows users to zoom and pan around conceptual maps and diagrams, click on elements to find out what they are and explore how they relate to each other. But under the surface, it’s also a semantically enabled knowledge graph, based on open standards (the W3C’s semantic web stack), that gives our consultants the power to integrate data from multiple sources through a shared ontology, incorporate structured technical models alongside more pictorial representations, and use the maps as base layers to tell stories and plot real-life data.
Our projects involve a large amount of analysis and synthesis from a wide variety of sources, owned and managed by different people, working in very different disciplines with different languages, tools and cultural norms. Some of this content is unstructured – interview notes, existing documents and slides, reference diagrams and so on – and some of it is structured – datasets, architectural models, systems engineering models, taxonomies and so on. The Shared Meaning Platform (“SMP”) is a tool that allows all of this disparate content to be brought together into a single place and presented in a form that everyone can easily understand and engage with.
The Shared Meaning Platform is a reference tool that helps users understand how organisations fit together.
Why is this important?
At the simplest level, it gives us a way to deal with the enormous complexity of organisational change while still connecting with individual stakeholders where they are. Instead of just presenting a generic Powerpoint deck, you can tell the high level story from a base map then zoom in to the specific areas of concern to your audience, and move the view around to wherever the conversation needs it to go.
More profoundly though, no matter how different each map or area of a map might appear, and no matter how great the variety of conversations they enable, they are still manifestations of the same model. Your solution architecture team may see and talk about the world very differently to your change management function, but you need to know that when they zoom out far enough they are both seeing and talking about the same thing, just as when people zoom out from exploring their own neighbourhoods on Google Earth, they eventually see the same planet.
Many organisations use “rich picture” or “big picture” approaches to achieve this effect when engaging their employees with transformation journeys, but the big picture tends to remain a static object on the wall. While creating these kinds of visuals has always been one of our core competencies, the difference is that we can now seamlessly connect the big picture story of change to the kinds of contextual visuals, models, stories and data needed to bring it to life for individual teams and sets of stakeholders.
Finally, the platform gives us an incredibly flexible tool for testing and iterating shared meaning between teams. When your programme sponsor is talking to the exec and points to “Service Delivery” in a Powerpoint slide, while your solution architect is talking to an outsourced software engineering team and points to “Service Delivery” on a technical diagram, how do you know if they are talking about the same thing, or about different things with the same name, or whether the difference even matters? The Shared Meaning Platform gives our clients the means not just to see and talk about how all these artefacts do or don’t fit together, but iterate towards common understanding and shared language wherever they are required.
The platform is built primarily from open source libraries and tools, and uses the W3C’s RDF family of standards for linked data to ensure accessibility and reusability of the underlying data models. For more technical discussion visit our github page.
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