Archive for the ‘Issue Mapping’ Category
IBIS, dialogue mapping, and the art of collaborative knowledge creation
Introduction
In earlier posts I’ve described a notation called IBIS (Issue-based information system), and demonstrated its utility in visualising reasoning and resolving complex issues through dialogue mapping. The IBIS notation consists of just three elements (issues, ideas and arguments) that can be connected in a small number of ways. Yet, despite these limitations, IBIS has been found to enhance creativity when used in collaborative design discussions. Given the simplicity of the notation and grammar, this claim is surprising, even paradoxical. The present post resolves this paradox by viewing collaborative knowledge creation as an art, and considers the aesthetic competencies required to facilitate this art.
Knowledge art
In a position paper entitled, The paradox of the “practice level” in collaborative design rationale, Al Selvin draws an analogy between design discussions using Compendium (an open source IBIS-based argument mapping tool) and art. He uses the example of the artist Piet Mondrian, highlighting the difference in style between Mondrian’s earlier and later work. To quote from the paper,
Whenever I think of surfacing design rationale as an intentional activity — something that people engaged in some effort decide to do (or have to do), I think of Piet Mondrian’s approach to painting in his later years. During this time, he departed from the naturalistic and impressionist (and more derivative, less original) work of his youth (view an image here) and produced the highly abstract geometric paintings (view an image here) most associated with his name…
Selvin points out that the difference between the first and the second paintings is essentially one of abstraction: the first one is almost instantly recognisable as a depiction of dunes on a beach whereas the second one, from Mondrian’s minimalist period, needs some effort to understand and appreciate, as it uses a very small number of elements to create a specific ambience. To quote from the paper again,
“One might think (as many in his day did) that he was betraying beauty, nature, and emotion by going in such an abstract direction. But for Mondrian it was the opposite. Each of his paintings in this vein was a fresh attempt to go as far as he could in the depiction of cosmic tensions and balances. Each mattered to him in a deeply personal way. Each was a unique foray into a depth of expression where nothing was given and everything had to be struggled for to bring into being without collapsing into imbalance and irrelevance. The depictions and the act of depicting were inseparable. We get to look at the seemingly effortless result, but there are storms behind the polished surfaces. Bringing about these perfected abstractions required emotion, expression, struggle, inspiration, failure and recovery — in short, creativity…”
In analogy, Selvin contends that a group of people who work through design issues using a minimalist notation such as IBIS can generate creative new ideas. In other words: IBIS, when used in a group setting such as dialogue mapping, can become a vehicle for collaborative creativity. The effectiveness of the tool, though, depends on those who wield it:
“…To my mind using tools and methods with groups is a matter of how effective, artistic, creative, etc. whoever is applying and organizing the approach can be with the situation, constraints, and people. Done effectively, even the force-fitting of rationale surfacing into a “free-flowing” design discussion can unleash creativity and imagination in the people engaged in the effort, getting people to “think different” and look at their situation through a different set of lenses. Done ineffectively, it can impede or smother creativity as so many normal methods, interventions, and attitudes do…”
Although Selvin’s discussion is framed in the context of design discussions using Compendium, this is but dialogue mapping by another name. So, in essence, he makes a case for viewing the collaborative generation of knowledge (through dialogue mapping or any other means) as an art. In fact, in another article, Selvin uses the term knowledge art to describe both the process and the product of creating knowledge as discussed above. Knowledge Art as he sees it, is a marriage of the two forms of discourse that make up the term. On the one hand, we have knowledge which, “… in an organizational setting, can be thought of as what is needed to perform work; the tacit and explicit concepts, relationships, and rules that allow us to know how to do what we do.” On the other, we have art which “… is concerned with heightened expression, metaphor, crafting, emotion, nuance, creativity, meaning, purpose, beauty, rhythm, timbre, tone, immediacy, and connection.”
Facilitating collaborative knowledge creation
In the business world, there’s never enough time to deliberate or think through ideas (either individually or collectively): everything is done in a hurry and the result is never as good as it should or could be; the picture never quite complete. However, as Selvin says,
“…each moment (spent discussing or thinking through ideas or designs) can yield a bit of the picture, if there is a way to capture the bits and relate them, piece them together over time. That capturing and piecing is the domain of Knowledge Art. Knowledge Art requires a spectrum of skills, regardless of how it’ practiced or what form it takes. It means listening and paying attention, determining the style and level of intervention, authenticity, engagement, providing conceptual frameworks and structures, improvisation, representational skill and fluidity, and skill in working with electronic information…”
So, knowledge art requires a wide range of technical and non-technical skills. In previous posts I’ve discussed some of technical skills required – fluency with IBIS, for example. Let’s now look at some of the non-technical competencies.
What are the competencies needed for collaborative knowledge creation? Palus and Horth offer some suggestions in their paper entitled, Leading Complexity; The Art of Making Sense. They define the concept of creative leadership as making shared sense out of complexity and chaos and the crafting of meaningful action. Creative leadership is akin to dialogue mapping, which Jeff Conklin describes as a means to achieve a shared understanding of wicked problems and a shared commitment to solving them. The connection between creative leadership and dialogue mapping is apparent once one notices the similarity between their definitions. So the competencies of creative leadership should apply to dialogue mapping (or collaborative knowledge creation) as well.
Palus and Horth describe six basic competencies of creative leadership. I outline these below, mentioning their relevance to dialogue mapping:
Paying Attention: This refers to the ability to slow down discourse with the aim of achieving a deep understanding of the issues at hand. A skilled dialogue mapper has to be able to listen; to pay attention to what’s being said.
Personalizing: This refers to the ability to draw upon personal experiences, interests and passions whilst engaged in work. Although the connection to dialogue mapping isn’t immediately evident, the point Palus and Horth make is that the ability to make connections between work and one’s interests and passions helps increase involvement, enthusiasm and motivation in tackling work challenges.
Imaging: This refers to the ability to visualise problems so as to understand them better, using metaphors, pictures stories etc to stimulate imagination, intuition and understanding. The connection to dialogue mapping is clear and needs no elaboration.
Serious play: This refers to the ability to experiment with new ideas; to learn by trying and doing in a non-threatening environment. This is something that software developers do when learning new technologies. A group engaged in a dialogue mapping must have a sense of play; of trying out new ideas, even if they seem somewhat unusual.
Collaborative enquiry: This refers to the ability to sustain productive dialogue in a diverse group of stakeholders. Again, the connection to dialogue mapping is evident.
Crafting: This refers to the ability to synthesise issues, ideas, arguments and actions into coherent, meaningful wholes. Yet again, the connection to dialogue mapping is clear – the end product is ideally a shared understanding of the problem and a shared commitment to a meaningful solution.
Palus and Horth suggest that these competencies have been ignored in the business world because:
- They are seen as threatening the status quo (creativity is to feared because it invariably leads to changes).
- These competencies are aesthetic, and the current emphasis on scientific management devalues competencies that are not rational or analytical.
The irony is that creative scientists have these aesthetic competencies (or qualities) in spades. At the most fundamental level science is an art – it is about constructing theories or designing experiments that make sense of the world. Where do the ideas for these new theories or experiments come from? Well, they certainly aren’t out there in the objective world; they come from the imagination of the scientist. Science, in the real sense of the word, is knowledge art. If these competencies are useful in science, they should be more than good enough for the business world.
Summing up
To sum up: knowledge creation in an organisational context is best viewed as an art – a collaborative art. Visual representations such as IBIS provide a medium to capture snippets of knowledge and relate them, or piece them together over time. They provide the canvas, brush and paint to express knowledge as art through the process of dialogue mapping.
The what and whence of issue-based information systems
Over the last few months I’ve written a number of posts on IBIS (short for Issue Based Information System), an argument visualisation technique invented in the early 1970s by Horst Rittel and Werner Kunz. IBIS is best known for its use in dialogue mapping – a collaborative approach to tackling wicked problems – but it has a range of other applications as well (capturing project knowledge is a good example). All my prior posts on IBIS focused on its use in specific applications. Hence the present piece, in which I discuss the “what” and “whence” of IBIS: its practical aspects – notation, grammar etc. – along with its origins, advantages and limitations
I’ll begin with a brief introduction to the technique (in its present form) and then move on to its origins and other aspects.
A brief introduction to IBIS
IBIS consists of three main elements:
- Issues (or questions): these are issues that need to be addressed.
- Positions (or ideas): these are responses to questions. Typically the set of ideas that respond to an issue represents the spectrum of perspectives on the issue.
- Arguments: these can be Pros (arguments supporting) or Cons (arguments against) an issue. The complete set of arguments that respond to an idea represents the multiplicity of viewpoints on it.
The best IBIS mapping tool is Compendium – it can be downloaded here. In Compendium, the IBIS elements described above are represented as nodes as shown in Figure 1: issues are represented by green question nodes; positions by yellow light bulbs; pros by green + signs and cons by red – signs. Compendium supports a few other node types, but these are not part of the core IBIS notation. Nodes can be linked only in ways specified by the IBIS grammar as I discuss next.
Figure 1: IBIS Elements
The IBIS grammar can be summarized in a few simple rules:
- Issues can be raised anew or can arise from other issues, positions or arguments. In other words, any IBIS element can be questioned. In Compendium notation: a question node can connect to any other IBIS node.
- Ideas can only respond to questions – i.e. in Compendium “light bulb” nodes can only link to question nodes. The arrow pointing from the idea to the question depicts the “responds to” relationship.
- Arguments can only be associated with ideas – i.e in Compendium + and – nodes can only link to “light bulb” nodes (with arrows pointing to the latter)
The legal links are summarized in Figure 2 below.
Figure 2: Legal Links in IBIS
The rules are best illustrated by example- follow the links below to see some illustrations of IBIS in action:
- See this post for a simple example of dialogue mapping.
- See this post or this one for examples of argument visualisation .
- See this post for the use IBIS in capturing project knowledge.
Now that we know how IBIS works and have seen a few examples of it in action, it’s time to trace its history from its origins to the present day.
Wicked origins
A good place to start is where it all started. IBIS was first described in a paper entitled, Issues as elements of Information Systems; written by Horst Rittel (who coined the term “wicked problem”) and Werner Kunz in July 1970. They state the intent behind IBIS in the very first line of the abstract of their paper:
Issue-Based Information Systems (IBIS) are meant to support coordination and planning of political decision processes. IBIS guides the identification, structuring, and settling of issues raised by problem-solving groups, and provides information pertinent to the discourse.
Rittel’s preoccupation was the area of public policy and planning – which is also the context in which he defined wicked problems originally. He defined the term in his landmark paper of 1973 entitled, Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning. A footnote to the paper states that it is based on an article that he presented at an AAAS meeting in 1969. So it is clear that he had already formulated his ideas on wickedness when he wrote his paper on IBIS in 1970.
Given the above background it is no surprise that Rittel and Kunz foresaw IBIS to be the:
…type of information system meant to support the work of cooperatives like governmental or administrative agencies or committees, planning groups, etc., that are confronted with a problem complex in order to arrive at a plan for decision…
The problems tackled by such cooperatives are paradigm-defining examples of wicked problems. From the start, then, IBIS was intended as a tool to facilitate a collaborative approach to solving such problems.
Operation of early systems
When Rittel and Kunz wrote their paper, there were three IBIS-type systems in operation: two in governmental agencies (in the US, one presumes) and one in a university environment (possibly, Berkeley, where Rittel worked). Although it seems quaint and old-fashioned now, it is no surprise that they were all manual, paper-based systems- the effort and expense involved in computerizing such systems in the early 70s would have been prohibitive, and the pay-off questionable.
The paper also offers a short description of how these early IBIS systems operated:
An initially unstructured problem area or topic denotes the task named by a “trigger phrase” (“Urban Renewal in Baltimore,” “The War,” “Tax Reform”). About this topic and its subtopics a discourse develops. Issues are brought up and disputed because different positions (Rittel’s word for ideas or responses) are assumed. Arguments are constructed in defense of or against the different positions until the issue is settled by convincing the opponents or decided by a formal decision procedure. Frequently questions of fact are directed to experts or fed into a documentation system. Answers obtained can be questioned and turned into issues. Through this counterplay of questioning and arguing, the participants form and exert their judgments incessantly, developing more structured pictures of the problem and its solutions. It is not possible to separate “understanding the problem” as a phase from “information” or “solution” since every formulation of the problem is also a statement about a potential solution.
Even today, forty years later, this is an excellent description of how IBIS is used to facilitate a common understanding of complex (or wicked) problems. The paper contains an overview of the structure and operation of manual IBIS-type systems. However, I’ll omit these because they are of little relevance in the present-day world.
As an aside, there’s a term that’s conspicuous by its absence in the Rittel-Kunz paper: design rationale. Rittel must have been aware of the utility of IBIS in capturing design rationale: he was a professor of design science at Berkley and design reasoning was one of his main interests. So it is somewhat odd that he does not mention this term even once in his IBIS paper.
Fast forward a couple decades (and more!)
In a paper published in 1988 entitled, gIBIS: A hypertext tool for exploratory policy discussion, Conklin and Begeman describe a prototype of a graphical, hypertext-based IBIS-type system (called gIBIS) and its use in capturing design rationale (yes, despite the title of the paper, it is more about capturing design rationale than policy discussions). The development of gIBIS represents a key step between the original Rittel-Kunz version of IBIS and its present-day version as implemented in Compendium. Amongst other things, IBIS was finally off paper and on to disk, opening up a new world of possibilities.
gIBIS aimed to offer users:
- The ability to capture design rationale – the options discussed (including the ones rejected) and the discussion around the pros and cons of each.
- A platform for promoting computer-mediated collaborative design work – ideally in situations where participants were located at sites remote from each other.
- The ability to store a large amount of information and to be able to navigate through it in an intuitive way.
Before moving on, one point needs to be emphasized: gIBIS was intended to be used in collaborative settings; to help groups achieve a shared understanding of central issues, by mapping out dialogues in real time. In present-day terms – one could say that it was intended as a tool for sense making.
The gIBIS prototype proved successful enough to catalyse the development of Questmap, a commercially available software tool that supported IBIS. However, although there were some notable early successes in the real-time use of IBIS in industry environments (see this paper, for example), these were not accompanied by widespread adoption of the technique. Other graphical, IBIS-like methods to capture design rationale were proposed (an example is Questions, Options and Criteria (QOC) proposed by MacLean et. al. in 1991), but these too met with a general reluctance in adoption.
Making sense through IBIS
The reasons for the lack of traction of IBIS-type techniques in industry are discussed in an excellent paper by Shum et. al. entitled, Hypermedia Support for Argumentation-Based Rationale: 15 Years on from gIBIS and QOC. The reasons they give are:
- For acceptance, any system must offer immediate value to the person who is using it. Quoting from the paper, “No designer can be expected to altruistically enter quality design rationale solely for the possible benefit of a possibly unknown person at an unknown point in the future for an unknown task. There must be immediate value.” Such immediate value is not obvious to novice users of IBIS-type systems.
- There is some effort involved in gaining fluency in the use of IBIS-based software tools. It is only after this that users can gain an appreciation of the value of such tools in overcoming the limitations of mapping design arguments on paper, whiteboards etc.
The intellectual effort – or cognitive overhead, as it is called in academese – in using IBIS in real time involves:
- Teasing out issues, ideas and arguments from the dialogue.
- Classifying points raised into issues, ideas and arguments.
- Naming (or describing) the point succinctly.
- Relating (or linking) the point to an existing node.
This is a fair bit of work, so it is no surprise that beginners might find it hard to use IBIS to map dialogues. However, once learnt, a skilled practitioner can add value to design (and more generally, sense making) discussions in several ways including:
- Keeping the map (and discussion) coherent and focused on pertinent issues.
- Ensuring that all participants are engaged in contributing to the map (and hence the discussion).
- Facilitating useful maps (and dialogues) – usefulness being measured by the extent to which the objectives of the session are achieved.
See this paper by Selvin and Shum for more on these criteria. Incidentally, these criteria are a qualitative measure of how well a group achieves a shared understanding of the problem under discussion. Clearly, there is a good deal of effort involved in learning and becoming proficient at using IBIS-type systems, but the payoff is an ability to facilitate a shared understanding of wicked problems – whether in public planning or in technical design.
Why IBIS is better than conventional modes of documentation
IBIS has several advantages over conventional documentation systems. Rittel and Kunz’s 1970 paper contains a nice summary of the advantages, which I paraphrase below:
- IBIS can bridge the gap between discussions and records of discussions (minutes, audio/video transcriptions etc,). IBIS sits between the two, acting as a short term memory. The paper thus foreshadows the use of issue-based systems as an aid to organizational or project memory.
- Many elements (issue, ideas or arguments) that come up in a discussion have contextual meanings that are different from any pre-existing definitions. In discussions, contextual meaning is more than formal meaning. IBIS captures the former in a very clear way – for example a response to a question “What do we mean by X? elicits the meaning of X in the context of the discussion, which is then subsequently captured as an idea (position)”.
- Related to the above, the commonality of an issue with other, similar issues might be more important than its precise meaning. To quote from the paper, “…the description of the subject matter in terms of librarians or documentalists (sic) may be less significant than the similarity of an issue with issues dealt with previously and the information used in their treatment…” With search technologies available, this is less of an issue now. However, search technologies are still limited in terms of finding matches between “similar” items (How is “similar” defined? Ans: it depends on context). A properly structured, context-searchable IBIS-based project archive may still be more useful than a conventional document archive based on a document management system.
- The reasoning used in discussions is made transparent, as is the supporting (or opposing) evidence. (see my post on visualizing argumentation for example)
- The state of the argument (discussion) at any time can be inferred at a glance (unlike the case in written records). See this post for more on the advantages of visual documentation over prose.
Issues with issue-based information systems
Lest I leave readers with the impression that IBIS is a panacea, I should emphasise that it isn’t. According to Conklin, IBIS maps have the following limitations:
- They atomize streams of thought into unnaturally small chunks of information thereby breaking up any smooth rhetorical flow that creates larger, more meaningful chunks of narrative.
- They disperse rhetorically connected chunks throughout a large structure.
- They are not is not chronological in structure (the chronological sequence is normally factored out);
- Contributions are not attributed (who said what is normally factored out).
- They do not convey the maturity of the map – one cannot distinguish, from the map alone, whether one map is more “sound” than another.
- They do not offer a systematic way to decide if two questions are the same, or how the maps of two related questions relate.
Some of these issues (points 3, 4) can be addressed by annotating nodes; others are not so easy to solve.
Concluding remarks
My aim in this post has been to introduce readers to the IBIS notation, and also discuss its origins, development and limitations. On one hand, a knowledge of the origins and development is valuable because it gives insight into the rationale behind the technique, which leads to a better understanding of the different ways in which it can be used. On the other, it is also important to know a technique’s limitations, if for no other reason than to be aware of these so that one can work around them.
Before signing off, I’d like to mention an observation from my experience with IBIS. The real surprise for me has been that the technique can capture most written arguments and discussions, despite having only three distinct elements and a very simple grammar. Yes, it does require some thought to do this, particularly when mapping discussions in real time. However, this cognitive “overhead” is good because it forces the mapper to think about what’s being said instead of just writing it down blind. Thoughtful transcription is the aim of the game. When done right, this results in a map that truly reflects a shared understanding of the complex (and possibly wicked) problem under discussion.
There’s no better coda to this post on IBIS than the following quote from this paper by Conklin:
…Despite concerns over the years that IBIS is too simple and limited on the one hand or too hard to use on the other, there is a growing international community who are fluent enough in IBIS to facilitate and capture highly contentious debates using dialogue mapping, primarily in corporate and educational environments…
For me that’s reason enough to improve my understanding of IBIS and its applications, and to look for opportunities to use it in ever more challenging situations.
Visualising arguments using issue maps – an example and some general comments
The aim of an opinion piece writer is to convince his or her readers that a particular idea or point of view is reasonable or right. Typically, such pieces weave facts , interpretations and reasoning into prose, wherefrom it can be hard to pick out the essential thread of argumentation. In an earlier post I showed how an issue map can help in clarifying the central arguments in a “difficult” piece of writing by mapping out Fred Brooks’ classic article No Silver Bullet. Note that I use the word “difficult” only because the article has, at times, been misunderstood and misquoted; not because it is particularly hard to follow. Still, Brooks’ article borders on the academic; the arguments presented therein are of interest to a relatively small group of people within the software development community. Most developers and architects aren’t terribly interested in the essential difficulties of the profession – they just want to get on with their jobs. In the present post, I develop an issue map of a piece that is of potentially wider interest to the IT community – Nicholas Carr’s 2003 article, IT Doesn’t Matter.
The main point of Carr’s article is that IT is becoming a utility, much like electricity, water or rail. As this trend towards commoditisation gains momentum, the strategic advantage offered by in-house IT will diminish, and organisations will be better served by buying IT services from “computing utility” providers than by maintaining their own IT shops. Although Carr makes a persuasive case, he glosses over a key difference between IT and other utilities (see this post for more). Despite this, many business and IT leaders have taken his words as the way things will be. It is therefore important for all IT professionals to understand Carr’s arguments. The consequences are likely to affect them some time soon, if they haven’t already.
Some preliminaries before proceeding with the map. First, the complete article is available here – you may want to have a read of it before proceeding (but this isn’t essential). Second, the discussion assumes a basic knowledge of IBIS (Issue-Based Information System) – see this post for a quick tutorial on IBIS. Third, the map is constructed using the open-source tool Compendium which can be downloaded here.
With the preliminaries out of the way, let’s get on with issue mapping Carr’s article.
So, what’s the root (i.e. central) question that Carr poses in the article? The title of the piece is “IT Doesn’t Matter” – so one possible root question is, “Why doesn’t IT matter?” But there are other candidates: “On what basis is IT an infrastructural technology?” or “Why is the strategic value of IT diminishing?” for example. From this it should be clear that there’s a fair degree of subjectivity at every step of constructing an issue map. The visual representation that I construct here is but one interpretation of Carr’s argument.
Out of the above (and many other possibles), I choose “Why doesn’t IT matter?” as the root question. Why? Well, in my view the whole point of the piece is to convince the reader that IT doesn’t matter because it is an infrastructural technology and consequently has no strategic significance. This point should become clearer as our development of the issue map progresses.
The ideas that respond to this question aren’t immediately obvious. This isn’t unusual: as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, points can only be made sequentially – one after the other – when expressed in prose. In some cases one may have to read a piece in its entirety to figure out the elements that respond to a root (or any other) question.
In the case at hand, the response to the root question stands out clearly after a quick browse through the article. It is: IT is an infrastructural technology.
The map with the root question and the response is shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Issue Map Stage 1
Moving on, what arguments does Carr offer for (pros) and against (cons) this idea? A reading of the article reveals one con and four pros. Let’s look at the cons first:
- IT (which I take to mean software) is complex and malleable, unlike other infrastructural technologies. This point is mentioned, in passing, on the third page of the paper: “Although more complex and malleable than its predecessors, IT has all the hallmarks of an infrastructural technology…”
The arguments supporting the idea that IT is an infrastructural technology are:
- The evolution of IT closely mirrors that of other infrastructural technologies such as electricity and rail. Although this point encompasses the other points made below, I think it merits a separate mention because the analogies are quite striking. Carr makes a very persuasive, well-researched case supporting this point.
- IT is highly replicable. This is point needs no further elaboration, I think.
- IT is a transport mechanism for digital information. This is true, at least as far as network and messaging infrastructure is concerned.
- Cost effectiveness increases as IT services are shared. This is true too, providing it is understood that flexibility is lost when services are shared.
The map, incorporating the pros and cons is shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2: Issue Map Stage 2
Now that the arguments for and against the notion that IT is an infrastructural technology are laid out, lets look at the article again, this time with an eye out for any other issues (questions) raised.
The first question is an obvious one: What are the consequences of IT being an infrastructural technology?
Another point to be considered is the role of proprietary technologies, which – by definition – aren’t infrastructural. The same holds true for custom built applications. So, this begs the question, if IT is an infrastructural technology, how do proprietary and custom built applications fit in?
The map, with these questions added in is shown in Figure 3.
Figure 3: Issue Map Stage 3
Let’s now look at the ideas that respond to these two questions.
A point that Carr makes early in the article is that the strategic value of IT is diminishing. This is essentially a consequence of the notion that IT is an infrastructural technology. This idea is supported by the following arguments:
- IT is ubiquitous – it is everywhere, at least in the business world.
- Everyone uses it in the same way. This implies that no one gets a strategic advantage from using it.
What about proprietary technologies and custom apps?. Carr reckons these are:
- Doomed to economic obsolescence. This idea is supported by the argument that these apps are too expensive and are hard to maintain.
- Related to the above, these will be replaced by generic apps that incorporate best practices. This trend is already evident in the increasing number of enterprise type applications that offered as services. The advantages of these are that they a) cost little b) can be offered over the web and c) spare the client all those painful maintenance headaches.
The map incorporating these ideas and their supporting arguments is shown in Figure 4.
Figure 4: Issue Map Stage 4
Finally, after painting this somewhat gloomy picture (to a corporate IT minion, such as me) Carr asks and answers the question: How should organisations deal with the changing role of IT (from strategic to operational)? His answers are:
- Reduce IT spend.
- Buy only proven technology – follow don’t lead.
- Focus on (operational) vulnerabilities rather than (strategic) opportunities.
The map incorporating this question and the ideas that respond to it is shown in Figure 5, which is also the final map (click on the graphic to view a full-sized image).
Figure 5: Issue Map Stage 5
Map completed, I’m essentially done with this post. Before closing, however, I’d like to mention a couple of general points that arise from issue mapping of prose pieces.
Figure 5 is my interpretation of the article. I should emphasise that my interpretation may not coincide with what Carr intended to convey (in fact, it probably doesn’t). This highlights an important, if obvious, point: what a writer intends to convey in his or her writing may not coincide with how readers interpret it. Even worse, different readers may interpret a piece differently. Writers need to write with an awareness of the potential for being misunderstood. So, my first point is that issue maps can help writers clarify and improve the quality of their reasoning before they cast it in prose.
Issue maps sketch out the logical skeleton or framework of argumentative prose. As such, they can help highlight weak points of arguments. For example, in the above article Carr glosses over the complexity and malleability of software. This is a weak point of the argument, because it is a key difference between IT and traditional infrastructural technologies. Thus my second point is that issue maps can help readers visualise weak links in arguments which might have been obscured by rhetoric and persuasive writing.
To conclude, issue maps are valuable to writers and readers: writers can use issue maps to improve the quality of their arguments before committing them in writing, and readers can use such maps to understand arguments that have been thus committed.
Eight to Late 
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