I’m probably showing my age by recalling the classic Rowan Atkinson after dinner speech, which starts: “Where … are we going?” After a number of increasingly convoluted questions, he terminates with: “And have we got a map?” Given the fact he was playing a crusty old buffer it may be fair to say that the sketch was timeless; as, funnily enough, was the advice he was giving.

It will come as no surprise to those who know me to say that I’m not among the most organised of souls. In Belbin terms my preference tends more towards the creative plant than the completer-finisher – though truth be told, this could be as much down to the relative ease at which one can arrive, sprinkle a few ideas and depart quickly, before the hard work of actually achieving something really begins. When it comes to knuckling down, I’m no shirk – but let’s just say easily distracted. Like Rimmer in Red Dwarf, I have been known to put as much effort (if not more) into perfectly crafted, multicoloured revision timetables, as doing any actual revision.

Always on the look-out for labour-saving devices, it can come as some surprise when one of them actually works. And so it was that I stumbled across mind mapping a few years ago, my first, jackdaw-like tendency to seize the opportunity to draw some more pretty pictures overwhelming any thought that they might actually be of help. After a preliminary stab, it was only when I listened to a couple of tapes by Michael Gelb that I really grasped the potential – and discipline – of mind mapping. With his smooth American tones I have the feeling that Mr Gelb could probably explain the art of fish filleting to seals quite convincingly, but whatever. I was hooked.

When I first dabbled in mind mapping, there was no real software tool that cut the mustard – which was fine, I had my multicoloured pens. I did try out a couple of packages at the time: there was MindMan for Windows, which at the time was little more than a drawing tool; there were also packages that enabled outlining of ideas – not least Microsoft Word, but also BrainStorm from David Tebbutt and programs like BrainForest for Palm – a product that I found so useful, it could well have seen me relying on the Palm platform to this day. Unsurprising for a flighty mind like mine however, I have never stuck with any single product, preferring to try new capabilities as time passed.

Mind maps can be used for a whole variety of things, but where I have found them the most useful is in getting my own life organised. I have recently been playing with the latest version of Mind Manager, version 7 (which happens to be the successor to MindMan), and I am rediscovering the strength of the core concept – the mind map – as a highly scalable graphical device. If (perish the thought) I suddenly remember a bunch of things I am supposed to be doing, I can add them to a map with relative ease, and use this as the basis for prioritisation. The same principle has applied when I have used maps for structuring reports or defining problem solving approaches: the map is a very efficient way to grow a corpus of information.

In practical terms, right now I have a complete picture of everything I’m supposed to be doing. There are a couple of features of the new product that really help me with this – the first is a single key combination to add priorities to map elements, and the second is a very intuitive map filter. If I just want to see priority-one items I can do so, avoiding the more general clutter. It’s not perfect – it lacks the ability to review priorities in the light of what I should really be getting on with, rather than what I find most interesting – but it would take more than a software tool to enable that!

While I may be back on the hook, the question is – will I wriggle off again? The main weakness I have found with such products in the past is that they were great at visualising ideas, and outlining, but lacked capabilities when I wanted to grow them in new directions – such as moving from individual to even more complex maps, from personal to team organisation, or integrating better with the other tools I use to do my job. I understand these are the issues Mind Manager 7 is seeking to address, so the proof of the pudding will be how far I progress with the tool before I find it becoming a constraint.

To my mind, the “killer app” for mind mapping remains that it is a personal productivity device – I would advise against trying to roll it out (as a capability or as a tool) for anything broader, in the first instance. While I do believe that initially, individuals need to discover the potential of mind mapping for themselves, I can see the benefits of broader application, across the team or even the organisation – information can be presented in a map succinctly and readably even to the non-initiated, for example.  Will companies become suddenly more profitable as a result of mind mapping? I doubt it, but then, in this increasingly socially networked world we live in, perhaps mind mapping techniques could offer at least part of the answer.

It’s always fun to speculate about greater things, but for myself, right now, there is only one question. Will I stick with it? To be honest I don’t know – but for the time being, it is exactly what I need.

By Jon Collins

The topic of media and digital content came up at a recent analyst briefing from Cisco on European and emerging markets. It wasn’t really surprising, considering that this truly is the hot new vertical, driven primarily by consumer markets and the entertainment industry, but with interesting possibilities for corporate computing as well. For its part, Cisco sees media and digital content as an opportunity, which is only to be expected when considered in light of its Linksys division and last year’s purchase of Scientific Atlanta.   

Because Cisco sits in the network, it equates the growth of digital media with growth for the network and for the products and services it offers to both consumers and companies. What made Cisco interesting is that it sees this change as an opportunity for consumers as well as for business. You could argue that other vendors also see digital and media content as an opportunity, but do they really? To me it seems that Cisco is more excited – and correctly so - by the possibilities of digital content for the infrastructure gains than by either the issues around the actual content itself or for the entertainment industry.  Sadly, that’s the trap many vendors fall into – and so far Cisco seems to be avoiding it.

So much of what we see as analysts is all about how to monitor, protect, police, and manage content. Granted security is an important issue and one that will never be solved in a changing digital world.  We accept that, but so often it seems that discussions we have with vendors all lead back to resurrecting the age old philosophical argument – is man basically good or is man basically evil, in the context of digital rights and stealing content.  Either people assume that content will be stolen no matter what we do, or they believe that people would not steal content if only there was a reasonable way to purchase and use it.

In reality, it is a tiresome set of arguments because there’s not a lot that we can do about it from a technology viewpoint beyond building better digital rights management (DRM) mousetraps and then smarter mice to get around them.  The problems are not technological, they are sociological and cultural. This means that social technology neither creates nor resolves the problem, although it can push some issues to the fore.

Rather than giving us self-righteous drivel about how Cisco really is looking out for the customer by hobbling software or enforcing questionable DRM by default, we had an interesting albeit short presentation about what a technology provider can realistically do or not do in that realm.  This isn’t to say that Cisco is not respectful of content rights or management. To the contrary, it has focused a lot on network security, how that extends to applications, and identity management – all important aspects in the overall picture.  What Cisco has done now is to focus on infrastructure enablement and get out of the way of how users create, post, or alter their content.

One of the other analysts attending the event, James Governor of Redmonk, wanted to know if Cisco was going to be an enabler of content, and Dan Scheinman, the senior vice president for Cisco's media solutions group responded that he just wants to enable customers to do whatever they want.  Although there was a lot of room for discussion around both the question and the answer, I think that was the right response. I cannot and will not imagine Cisco focusing on content creation or ownership.  It shouldn’t.  And it feels as though too many companies who want to be involved in the technology around media and digital content have a hard time understanding the line between enabling customers, enabling content, and becoming responsible for that content throughout its lifecycle.

There is a slippery slope in the industry right now as too many diverse issues are being drawn together by common, affordable technologies. Music rights, performance rights, film rights, image rights, international rights, licensing, and fair use are among the various complex issues that are being unfortunately lumped together. Vendors cannot solve these problems with their technology; they must be solved within countries and between countries. Technology should be used to make it easier to work within the laws and customs agreed upon and without causing further problems, obfuscation, and limits.  That’s going to take a long time to sort out as most of the players seem to be avoiding courts of law to settle these issues. 

In the meantime, I wish more companies took Cisco’s approach.

By Joyce Tompsett Becknell