Consulting for Improving
Information & Processes
Information & Processes
In the information economy, improving operations or standing up new ones is harder than ever. When you're producing knowledge instead of widgets, it's harder to quantify assets, identify your product, and measure your efficiency in meeting goals. The days of defined best practices are largely over. Tighter budgets dictate smaller staffs that are more focused to the task at hand and less free to focus on new tasks or addressing existing problems.
We'll be in touch soon!
You want to improve your workers' efficiency. We can help you do that in three ways:
An information economy relies on clear, organized, understandable information. Information Architecture (IA) grew out of website development, but we believe its tenets—consideration of the knowledge and expeirence of the intended audience, clean presentation of information, and focus on usability of the solution—will revolutionize process consulting.
Management consultants get a bad rap. We believe they have great skills, they are just staffed poorly. Their fundamental principles—focus on strategy and communication, ability to apply prior experience to solve new problems, and constant drive for efficiency—are ours too.
Part information architect.
Part management consultant.
100% Corporate Cartographer.
You've heard it before, but we really mean it when we say we're a different kind of consulting company.
First, we staff every client the same way: with two cartographers. One is the Creative Cartographer, focusing on framing the problem, facilitating, and designing the flow of the solution. We balance this with a Technical Cartographer who looks for the most feasible, fastest, and least expensive means to implement technical solutions to solve your problems.
Second, we don't keep a huge full-time staff—and the need to find a way to keep them billable at all times. We've made partnerships with other consultancies and the freelance community—designers, coders, subject experts—and we leverage their experience to build creative solutions without the overhead.
Knowledge isn't power. Organized, clear, up-to-date knowledge is power. Efficient writing and presentation make sure that the information you need is readily accessible. Clarifying your operations is what gets you there; after all, you can't get everyone on the same page if that page doesn't exist.
Improving processes is really about improving your workers' efficiency. Whenever you implement a change, design a new process, or create a reporting metric, you're looking for a quantifiable return on that investment of time and effort. Tightening your processes and eliminating bottlenecks ensures you get the returns you're looking for.
Clean manual processes can get you a long way, but some tasks must turn to technical solutions to meet constraints such as small staff sizes, short timetables, or necessary audit trails. With enough time and money, you can make a system do anything. But you don't have unlimited resources, so the key is to get to the right system as quickly as possible.
Corporate Cartography started over a pizza shared between its founders in Jackson, Mississippi four years ago. They had spent several months jumping from task to task, trying to ensure the smooth operation of the State of Mississippi's Hurricane Katrina recovery programs, and realized that the work was impossible to perform without everyone reaching a common understanding. In short, before jumping to conclusions as to the solution, there had to be a plan to get there. And often, a whiteboard and a simple flow chart is what got the ball rolling.
Jon-Pierre Micucci sees the world in flow charts, enjoys thinking through problems collaboratively, and seldom leaves a whiteboard blank. He's best at thinking on his feet, outside of the box—so it's always a surprise when someone learns that his degree from Boston College was in Accounting and Business Systems.
JP has over 12 years of management consulting and information architecture experience. Following Hurricane Katrina, JP facilitated the build-out of eligibility and disbursement operations for Mississippi's Homeowner Assistance Programs, bridging the expertise of accountants, consultants, lawyers, and technical developers into real, implementable process solutions.
Jay Mehta has always been a techie—he originally planned on being a CS geek at Georgia Tech. But at some point, he realized he was a rare techie who could write, and passed on GT for Journalism at GW.
Jay has seven years of professional service experience in fields such as technical training, technical writing, process design, IT requirements production, and reporting/dashboard creation. Jay can handle PHP development, CSS, XHTML, Javascript, and MySQL, and he's a master of software as well, such as the Adobe Creative Suite, MS Office, Omnigraffle and Crystal Reports.
We are proud members of the Affinity Lab, an entrepreneurial launch platform serving a rich community of creative businesses, non-profits and start-ups. The Lab is stocked with consultancies that can be called upon when needed—coders, designers, strategists.
1712 R Street, NW
Washington, DC 20009-2410
(202) 642-3967
(703) 563-9597
info@corpcart.com
© 2011 Corporate Cartography, LLC. All Rights Reserved.