Planning, Procurement, & Governance
Update your strategic posture for the changing information environment, where your relationships—and their dynamics—matter more than ever.
Business Ecosystem Mapping
We'll help you get everybody in your organization on the same literal page, with respect to everything in the world you need to monitor. Start with the essentials, then add detail as needed.
Vendor Assessments
Whether you're thinking about AI, digital sovereignty, or just plain need to take a census, we can help inventory your existing—or prospective—tech vendors and assess their capabilities, costs, and risks.
Governance Planning
Information infrastructure, that is both high-performing and durable, needs dedicated leadership and resources. We'll help you establish the contours
Products, Content, & Infrastructure
Circumnavigate tough projects, carve them up at the joints, and define the finish line.
Planning the Plan
Do you have a project where a big part of the job is just figuring out what the job even is? We can help with essential pre-planning to help you achieve the conceptual integrity you need for your project to run smoothly.
Content (Dis)solution
Tame your sprawling website and/or knowledge base, and put it on a track to achieve the most utility from the smallest footprint.
Term Reconciliation
Are your teams using different words to mean the same thing? How about the same word to mean different things? Get everybody on the same page with a robust and versatile concept scheme.
Technical Guidance & Support
Team swamped? Call in a ringer.
Literature Review
No time to burrow into specs, standards, and academic papers? We'll root through them and flag what you need to know.
Code Archaeology
Trying to add multilingual support to a 20-year-old codebase, or inventory the assets of a recent merger? We can help.
Data Design & Prototyping
Get critical help with your ETLs, ACLs, and APIs.
Training Seminars & Workshops
Inspire and equip your team with the techniques we use ourselves. 90-minute seminars to change a paradigm, or half-day workshops to put it into action.
Pivot to Protocols
Learn how open data standards protect your organization from the caprice of vendors, foster durable information systems, and even project soft power.
The Specificity Gradient
Master how to frame your situation, projects, and business in terms of increasing detail and sensitivity to time.
Fermi Scoping
Stop estimating effort, and start estimating value, with this One Weird Trick™.
Semantic REST
Go beyond APIs and unlock the full power of this profound and elegant software architectural style.
Values & Approach
At Method & Structure, we believe in working incrementally, iteratively, and out in the open. You're the expert at your business; we're the experts at organizing information. Our role is to gather, concentrate, and represent it back to you in a coherent way, so you can best comprehend your situation, make the most informed decisions, and achieve the best possible outcomes.
Our engagements are calibrated to start out low-risk with a rapid turnaround, and our work product is designed to accumulate and increase in intricacy over time, so our relationships can progress naturally.
We are also committed to using open standard protocols, open data formats, and open-source software, for maximum correctness, longevity, interoperability.
Tools & Techniques
We strongly believe that if the right tool for the job is nowhere to be bought, it behooves you to make it. Here is a partial portfolio:
Sense Atlas
Sense Atlas is a tool for making connected maps of things that typically resist mapping: from stakeholder requirements and project dependencies, to concepts and the audiences who take an interest in them, to companies and the people who work there. Every Method & Structure client gets a complimentary managed instance of Sense Atlas during this private alpha period.
Intertwingler
Named after a word coined by the inventor of hypertext to refer to copious linking, Intertwingler is an application server designed to wrangle just that. As the engine that powers Sense Atlas, Intertwingler is built for creating knowledge graphs: densely-packed thickets of interconnected information that get you understanding more while having to read less. Intertwingler also exposes all forms of structured data for direct consumption by other software systems, and uses a specially-designed address resolution mechanism to eliminate link rot for good.
Linked Data Vocabularies
We have authored over a dozen data vocabularies (ontologies) for various domains like issue mapping, content analysis, interaction design, and project planning.