Enterprise Mind Mapping: Your Right Brain Wants It, iPhone Has It
by Bill French on 27/04/09 at 1:28 am
Bill French is an information architect specializing in Internet applications. He is also the co-founder of MyST Technology Partners and Senior Editor for iPhoneCTO.
Part One of Three…
Since the dawn of the human race, we’ve sketched ideas, plans, and historical events. The essence of planning is found in our brain’s creative hemisphere – a place where thoughts are captured and shaped for better understanding and communication.
Formal mind mapping has been around for centuries, but it didn’t achieve much attention until the early 1970’s when a British psychologist named Tony Buzan published papers suggesting that information visualization techniques were extremely useful in solving problems.
Mind mapping has emerged in enterprises as a distinct form of communication that helps us reduce complex processes and ideas into tokens that can be more easily discussed and manipulated to establish deeper understanding for individuals and teams. Modeling complex ideas at a high level is also ideal for building consensus among individuals.
While there’s little evidence that iPhone-based mind mapping applications are in wide use in the enterprise today, the fact that they exist is an indicator of present and future interest. Simon Stapleton has researched the general adoption of mind mapping in the enterprise – a survey of 80 IT professionals showed that more than 60% of them regularly used mind mapping tools in their work.
But one aspect of mind mapping is clear; enterprises benefit from these tools directly and indirectly. Business process and automation projects are typically mapped out by IT organizations as part of the internal requirements management process. Creative service providers such as web design and marketing consultants leverage the use of mind maps to communicate ideas and strategies.
Mind mapping on-the-go is also extremely valuable; in certain situations, the mapping process can be optimized and best performed “on-location”. Industries like construction, manufacturing, transportation, and mining bring challenges that are difficult to fully understand without being on-site. Until recently, mobile mind mapping was restricted to a notebook or a scratch-pad and pencil, but not any longer. With the emergence of iPhone and it’s powerful multi-touch capabilities, mind mapping on-the-go is within reach to anyone, anywhere.
It’s now possible to glance at a problem, open a mapping application in the palm of your hand, and capture thoughts, ideas, and possibly a flash-of-genius moment that leads to a solution; all in real time. Before iPhone, opportunistic mind mapping was greatly constrained, and those Blink-like moments of inspiration had to survive long journeys and huge distractions as thought-payloads made their way back to a PC and a free moment when the idea could actually be captured. Mind mapping applications on the iPhone provide opportunities to seize the moment, allowing business people to accelerate problem-solving methodologies within the enterprise.
Mind mapping tools for businesses have struggled over the last decade for many reasons, the biggest drag on wide adoption is that they are typically regarded as personal productivity tools. Indeed, there’s a tight coupling of right-brain activities to an individual. Additionally, most mind map tools have been designed for individual PC users, thus locking the mind map data to the local file system of the user. Collaborative development and sharing of mind maps has been an afterthought.
Products such as ZeptoPad for iPhone have taken the personal nature of mind mapping to a collaborative level. ZeptoPad is a sketch pad that may also be integrated with a web server to facilitate real-time display of the sketching process to other people, even to a team in a far-away conference room, or projected to a large audience. With ZeptoPad, two iPhone users (together or geographically remote) are able to work on a single sketch concurrently and in real-time.
Mind mapping is transitioning into a business tool partly because there are new web services available to support collaboration more effectively (i.e., the emergence of Web 2.0 and XML integration standards), but also because gesture-based user interfaces are available. While PC-based mind map products provide relatively productive keyboard interfaces for designing mind maps, there’s something very powerful about using your fingers and other gestures to sketch thoughts. Even with the advanced user interface possibilities of the iPhone, the level of data being captured in the mapping process and the UI implementation approach can make or break a mind map product as you’ll see when we delve into the some of the mind mapping tools available.
In Part 2 of Mind Mapping: Your Left Brain Wants It, we’ll explore the business requirements of opportunistic mind mapping in the enterprise, which will pave the way for a products round-up.
