PRODUCT REVIEW - COGMAP- a wiki for Org Charts

Posted by Jim Stroud

November 24, 2006

CogMap, Cogmap, Cogmap… Ooooohhh… The possibilities! ( Big thanks to Joel Cheesman for bringing this out to my attention. )

Check this out from their website…

What is CogMap?

CogMap is the Wikipedia of organization charts. We are an organization chart wiki! This means that it is a collection of organization charts online that anyone can edit, add to, and help maintain.

CogMap is a tool for sales people, entrepreneurs, and recruiters to understand organizations and keep information up to date. If you are like us, you had some of these things happen to you:

Worked at a company without a published organization chart and had no idea who worked for anyone else
Tried to figure out who to call at a company and come up empty
Bought a list of people to call and had all the information be wrong
Met people that all had different titles and been unable to tell who was the decision-maker in the room!

Here is a peek at Cogmap in action…

When I first began playing with Cogmap, I thought - Oooooohhh!!! Nice one! After playing around with it, I still had a “wow” feeling, but had only a few slight reservations. And then after thinking of the reservations, I began thinking on how to improve this cool app even more and began brainstorming and before you know it… I had a wishlist on what or rather, how I want Cogmap to evolve over the next year.

If you want to see my suggestions, here they are…

1. Give users the ability to restrict access to select users. The way it is set up now, you have encouraged a schizoidphrenic crowd. Sure Sourcers and Recruiters love the very idea of your product, however why would we contribute to it? Why would we want to make it easier for others to recruit our people? So right away, I AM DEVOURING all the data that is here, but not really expecting it to grow as is.

On the other hand, as a “closed-door” wiki, I and all of the recruiters working in my company would freely contribute based on what we find online, people we interview and referrals from people already working at our company. Again, all for the benefit of those who work alongside me inside my company.

2. Set up a privacy policy so you won’t get sued (especially the way things are set up now). It should say in so many words that you are supplying a tool and are blameless for how other people are using it. I can imagine several paranoid companies already alerting their legal departments to red alert.

3. Integrate a wiki-map into your system. Hook it up so that if I am researching a company, I can see where all of their sales offices are, development centers, etc and then I could (with the help of company employees) create data on each area. For example, who are all the managers working in the San Jose location of my competitor and who are the engineers that report to them? What products and services are produced there and who does what? Clicking on a company and its various locations should give me the answers.

4. Automatically integrate org chart info from Hoovers, OneSource and products like them. This will help your users by giving them a big headstart.

5. When I mouse over a name in the org chart, it would be nice if a small pop-up window appeared that gave a bio and/or notes that people have made on that person. Or at the very least, a note that says Name, Title, X number of entries made about that person.

6. Integrate it with the leading ATS systems so that as candidates enter our ATS from select companies, they are automatically populated into the org chart with a timestamp (so we know how fresh the data is).

7. Pull data from newspaper articles the way Zoominfo does it and integrate into Cogmap.

8. Finally, join forces with Pagebites and integrate the resumes and bios they find online into your system.

Cogmap, if you add all of the above into your system, you will have the next KILLER APP for HR and I would be the first to shout its praises from the rooftops of the blogospehere.

-Jim