I was catching up the Twittersphere while watching my Tour de France DVR recordings and I picked up a great link to a website called Hypershifters which discusses visualization mapping for business and specifically technology.
Mind Mapping is a tool I added to my arsenal a few years ago and I can’t live without it now. For organizing concepts and ideas quickly in a visual way goes a long way at being able to organize and dissect a complex idea or to spur creative thought. I’ve used it to organize the hierarchy of SharePoint installations by breaking down farm configurations, site collection architecture, and demonstrate content publishing paths, and for figuring out the site hierarchy of a web site for a client. I started years ago using a product from MindJet called Mind Manager, but have recently messed around with MindMeister and Xmind because of the on-line collaborative component. The next best thing to mind mapping is collaborating with someone else on the mind map! MindJet also has an on-line offering, but they didn’t offer one at the time. I have settled on Xmind because of the functionality of being able to incorporate multiple ideas in one map, the ability to have a desktop version, and the collaboration aspect.
Have you given mind mapping a try? What was your experience? If you’ve tried it what tool do you recommend?
Wallace Tait
July 29th, 2009
While I agree a Mind map is an excellent over viewer, brainstorming app and presentation tool, it just doesn’t offer information management database capabilities for corporate business use.
Consider the “Method Neutral” approach to information management. I have found that information is what we want to manage rather than the graphical look and feel of the framework it resides in.
The look and feel is indeed important, but I firmly believe we have to understand, information has become a commodity that has a monetized value. This value can be handled within our respective “information economies” where we work and produce for our Business Management Systems.
Let’s use the “method neutral” approach, and move beyond Mind mapping.
ianrudy
July 29th, 2009
Wallace,
I agree with you on the “Method Neutral” approach allowing me to select how I want to view my information, but unfortunately the technology landscape hasn’t quite caught up to that yet. I constantly struggle with various sources of information in order to create relevant knowledge and understand patterns, but the tools just aren’t there yet. Mind mapping and visualization is an important first step though and your suggestions of uses are spot on. Nothing would please me more than to choose which interface I wanted to view my/company information, but more importantly be able to switch it depending on what “mode” I was in. I can’t wait to be able to switch the front end of a SharePoint portal into a virtual map, give me a Grokker/MindMap front end. Hey you might know this, there was a visual search engine technology that came out of CMU a few years back, what was the name of it and is it still around?
Thanks for the comment
Ian