Dan Prager on the bCisive approach to Visual Mapping

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Dan Prager on the bCisive approach to Visual Mapping

19 June 2010 785 views View Comments

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I’ve always been intrigued with argument mapping. And when I was introduced to Tim Van Gelder, the founder and director at Austhink Software, the developers of bCisive and Rationale, I just had to request that someone would do a better job than I would of delivering information regarding their excellent software offerings.
Wallace Tait: Visualmapper

Dan Prager CEO at Austhink jumped at the chance to present a good case for the use of bCisive.

Dan does software strategy, agile team leadership, design, architecture, and programming. Past experience includes research and development, commercial consulting on optimization and simulation, and teaching. Dan holds a PhD in mathematics, and practices and teaches martial arts. He also blogs, and his favorite t-shirt reads “No-one cares about your blog”.

bCisive Online is a web-based visual mapping tool from Austhink Software, aimed primarily at complex decision-making, individual and team problem-solving, presentation and facilitation.

If you are a mind-mapping afficionado, but have had trouble getting the rest of your team to work with mind-maps, bCisive Online offers an alternative path to visual thinking. Our users have found that facilitating a meeting or problem-solving session is a great way to get buy-in from the group.

The modes of visual thinking supported in bCisive Online overlap with mind-mapping, but the visual and manipulatory conventions are a bit different. Here’s a short video illustrating the basic mechanics of map-building and editing.

Notably, bCisive Online allows multiple maps on a workspace, and makes playing with ideas in a bottom-up or top-down fashion (or any combination thereof) both practical and enjouyable.

For the more experienced user, advanced features include:

Real-time collaboration over the internet, including one-click integrated Skype, remote virtual laser pointers for all participants, and disciplined passing around of “control” (the power to edit)
A private portal for your team or organization: E.g. http://myorganization.bcisiveonline.com
Easy export to PowerPoint

A feature aimed at bloggers is the facility to publish completed maps to the web. Similar to embedding a Youtube video, or a Slideshare presentation, bCisive Online enables you to embed a readonly workspace containing one or more maps in your blog (or in any web-page). Unlike a fixed image, this workspace is zoomable and foldable. Here is an embedded bCisive Online map, based on an editorial in the New York Times:

Best viewed in full screen, try zooming in and out, and hiding and showing branches and sub-branches. Clicking on a non-map area of the workspace to pan around at high zoom levels.

bCisive Online is free to try, and available at reasonable rates on a subscription basis.

visualmapper

So; do the readers believe this format of information mapping is valid enough to be using in the mainstream? I use bCisive desktop (albeit an older version), and it's rather powerful once you get into the direction of your argument maps.

The pricing of the desktop edition is comparable to a few of the mainstream Visual mapping products that certainly have multiple formats available. While bCisive is a niche product, I am curious if the article author has a view of expanding the graphical layout formats?

Competing with mainstream Visual mapping producers such as Mindjet, CS Odessa, MindGenius, Simtech and others; how does Austhink view the value add of this single format for argument mapping?

It's certainly only a matter of time before the mentioned benchmarks add the ability to create argumentation maps within their products; How will bCisive compete with this probability?
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