Wardley maps and the general effort to represent human organization using ontologies (e.g., Business Model Canvas) are quite fascinating (and useful, necessary etc). Yet it strikes me that the whole ontology and mapping effort movements miss an important feedback loop that would elevate these beyond the minimal: "here is another meaningful way to connect some dots on a graph".
What is missing is a widely available empirical basis offering, minimally, validation from actual business developments. For that you need lots of relevant data, pooled from a large number of business projects over long periods of time. Proprietariness and cost are probably the main reasons we don't have that.
I have been following Simon Wardley on Twitter and read most of his blog posts about mapping and maybe kind of worked through his examples - so I am not any kind of expert and had never used them before. I was introduced by a client to the roof truss industry. Here is a link to one corner of an entire ecosystem:
https://www.tpinst.org/
Just to help me make sense of an industry that I was completely unfamiliar with, I mapped it from lumber producers all the way to home owners. I showed the map to my client and just briefly explained what the axis were. He was able to clarify my understanding and point out where other players fit in that he had not mentioned before. By realizing that different players will fight commodification, we could see their likely moves. Time will tell if we are correct.
So my take-away is that it is useful. I went from complete ignorance of an industry that has a new technology being introduced, to making reasonable guesses about the likely moves of incumbents in just 2-3 hours.
I’ve had a similar issue with the Business Model Canvas which, while very useful in visualizing a business’ model, leaves me hanging and a bit uncomfortable because, as you said, there are no (or incomplete) hard data to back up its claims.
On the other hand, if we were to consider these tools as just hypotheses makers and validate those hypotheses with the company’s financials (among other things), I think they’d be a very valuable component of a very able business management toolkit.
What is missing is a widely available empirical basis offering, minimally, validation from actual business developments. For that you need lots of relevant data, pooled from a large number of business projects over long periods of time. Proprietariness and cost are probably the main reasons we don't have that.