Two candidates for the KM Killer App
Vinson had a post recently, discussing the concept of the Killer App and what might fit that bill in the KM world. His list contains all the usual suspects in the area of "knowledge presentation", but skips over what I think is the most critical KM element; how to capture all thatknowledge in the first place.
I've written recently about the wiki,a nice tool for tearing down the distribution and format barriers to knowledge capture. Good stuff, but it's focused on knowledge that's relatively structured - at least, structured enough such that the author can throw it into the wiki and let the "backbone" that is the Table of Contents take shape naturally.
But how do individuals capture the ideas that are floating around in their heads that don't have an apparent structure? Enter the Mind Map, a technique for throwing ideas on a wall, just to see what kind of structure begins to take shape. Of course, "drawing" the connections and structures between ideas is somewhat labor intensive, until you start playing with software that facilitates the construction of these maps.
Since I've written about MindManager, I've come across a number of interesting sites ...
- Chuck Frey's Mind Mapping Software Weblog, an offshoot of his Innovation Tools site, focuses on visual mapping for business people
- Nick Duffill's Beyond Mind Mapping links a number of threads between mind mapping and general innovation sites
- Kyle McFarlin writes about information visualization at The Underlying Blog
- Jamie Nast has a nice site called idea mapping, which ties to her book of the same name.
- Eric Mack blogs about a wide range of KM and visualization topics
- MindMapping Tools has a number of pages with interesting links, samples of mind maps, etc.
... and software packages ...
- bubbl.us (via Lifehhacker), a simple, web-based, sharable brainstorming tool. Very web 2.0-ish
- Thinkature, another web-based collaborative drawing space
- NovaMind, which was one of the few tools I saw that supported the smooth curves "required" by Buzan
- Mind Map Software talks about ConceptDraw, another curve-drawer, whose mind-mapping software is apparently one of a family of drawing tools
- FreeMind, the GPL software that delivers mind mapping on the cheap. I like these folks, because they provide an outlet if they make you angry ...
<aside> Oh yes - what's the 2nd candidate for KM Killer App? Why, it's Search - because it does double duty. Sure, it provides the knowledge presentation layer ... but it also enables knowledge capture by making the tool (Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Wiki, PDF, SQL, Notes, etc.) unimportant.</aside>
Updated 2/10 - Fixed Vinson link
posted by James P. MacLennan at 10:53 PM
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