There are two methods of mapping Authority Documents’ Citations to compare them to each other; crosswalking and harmonization to Common Controls.
Simple crosswalking is what you see in most spreadsheets, and in very simplistic mappings of an Authority Document to other Citations. You’ll see the Authority Document’s Citation and then a table of other Citations that are supposedly mapped to that Citation. This supposes that the person who performed the exercise examined each Citation in relation to the other Citations in a matrix.
On the surface this sounds easy – read and interpret the Citation and determine if it matches another Citation. But the reality is much different because each Citation must be matched to each of the other Citations. There is a mathematical formula that will tell you the number of combinations it takes to do this. You can easily calculate the number of calculations in Excel by typing =COMBIN(N,2) into any cell, wherein N stands for the total number of Citations in both documents being compared.
The other methodology is to define Common Controls to map against. In this methodology, each Citation is examined once. It is either found to match an existing Common Control, or a new Common Control is created. Instead of mapping each Citation to every other Citation, each Citation is mapped to a Common Control. As a result, matching Citations are found to match the same Common Control. The mathematical formula is 1 mapping task per Mandate. It either matches or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, a new Common Control is created. You can recognize this approach because the mapping will show the Common Control that links the Citations together.
Which way is easier and more cost effective? This calculator uses that Excel formula to show you the difference.
Ok, Let's StartCalculate the savings between the Crosswalking method and the Common Controls method