Let’s talk about Mind Mapping. It is a simple, easy to use, but powerful tool that helps with managing knowledge and ideas. Mind Mapping can be performed on a piece of paper, a drawing board or even on computers. We’ll talk about Mind Mapping with respect to computers in a while. And before we move into the subject, i’d like to explain what knowledge management is.

Knowledge management is a practice that involves creating, representing, distributing knowledge about an activity or activities to enable documenting of the experiences and ideas accumulated over the course of time. - My interpretation from an extract on Wikipedia.

Knowledge management is a crucial activity commonly practiced in large organisations. There’s a very large amount of data flowing in and out of the organisations everyday. And only with the right strategy and tools, such volume of data can be be successfully captured, analyzed and updated on time to time basis. One may question - Why is there a need to capture, analyze and update such data? This is because the resulting information generated can be fruitfully used to improve and strengthen the organisation as a whole.

Now, i’d like to talk about Mind Mapping. It is a tool that has several uses with knowledge management being one of them. Mind Mapping is actively used to deal with human resources, information technology and business strategy of an organisation. To keep the context relevant, i’d talk about how useful mind mapping has proved to me at work and how it has benefited me over the course of time.

Watch the video explaining how mind mapping works:

Benefits

Benefits of using a Mind Mapping software are that it is simple to use, it does not take any amount of time to learn the software and within no time you can sketch your ideas on it and save your mind map. Various amounts of tools are available to design and graphic your mind map and take it to another level and different dimensions of which you cannot achieve through just a pen and paper. You can also  export your mind map to an image file, or a  HTML extension etc.

How Mind Map has helped me

I work in the corporate law field and it has various technical and legal procedures that each act has to say.

There are some legal procedures that are common for all companies and have to be carried out on day to day basis or whenever the need arises.

For this purpose, I use mind map and jot down procedures and legal aspects and compliance's  that can be referred to, either by me or any other person in my team in my absence so there are no road blocks in case of any body's absence.

Below is one of the simple mind map I created relating to the legal procedure for changing the name of a company.

A few Mind Maps I came across over the internet just for ideas.

P.S. the above three mind maps are not my creation. I have taken it from the internet just to give a glimpse of how a mind map can also look like.

A handful of free mind mapping tools available for download:

1. CAM Editor: http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/camprocessor/index.php?title=Main_Page
2. Coogle: http://coggle.it/
3. FreeMind: http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Download

PS - You can read more about Mind Mapping on this LINK.

This blog is a part of IT assignment given by Prof. Arun Kumar V Waghchoure, as mentioned on
website www.tigriinnovations.com My Name : Akshay Bandodkar Roll No : 25 Batch: DHRM August 2012