How much do you pay for team communication? Look at Skype and ConceptDraw MINDMAP as low-cost highly-effective tools

With growing demand for support of virtual teams, the presence of ubiquitools with omnifunctions on platforms for everything from a phone to a computer has exploded in the past decade. Consultancies, small businesses and virtual teams have their pick from a wide range of options to assist in the management of remote staffers.


One low-cost service that has seen increased use since its inception to improve communication is Skype®. With over “250 million active users each month [and] over 115 billion call-minutes logged in quarter 2 (of 2012), alone,” Mark Gillet, Skype’s Chief Development and Operations Officer Skype is a clear leader in cost-effective communications. Now, CS Odessa has capitalized on that popularity and released a new feature for ConceptDraw® MINDMAP that instantly shares and opens presentation documents for each attendee before the presentation begins. 

Unfortunately, when it comes to communication tool-sets, many developers miss the mark when it comes to cross platform applications. Often, the practical solution is a piecemeal of software, email, and phone services that can result in an adequate level of communication; adequate, but not ideal. If some users are not using the preferred platform, a meeting can get congested with dissemination of information, as users can’t all read the same documents.

Since both ConceptDraw MINDMAP and Skype are Windows and Mac compatible, all users have the freedom to access and edit documents mind map documents on their own system while a presentation is underway. Furthermore, even if a mind map was created using other ConceptDraw products, such as ConceptDraw Project, the users can still view the entire document using just ConceptDraw MINDMAP and Skype.

One of the best features of ConceptDraw MINDMAP its cost-effectiveness. For $199 per license, you get a powerful mind-mapping and presentation tool. Using MINDMAP with Skype Presentation, MINDMAP delivers empowering interoperability features that can support meetings, briefings, and brainstorming sessions from across the world with heretofore unseen accessibility, ease-of-use, and power. Combined with Skype’s low or no-cost, Skype Presentation Solution for ConceptDraw MINDMAP gives users a high-powered efficiency tool raises project success-rates dramatically.

What Makes Companies go from Outsourcing to Insourcing? The Need for Innovation!

Was Outsourcing a Mistake, or Just a Blip?
The December 12 Atlantic Monthly has a couple of great articles on the rise of insourcing. In The Insourcing Boom, author Charles Fishman makes a pretty stunning assertion:

What is only now dawning on the smart American companies, says Lenzi, is that when you outsource the making of the products, “your whole business goes with the outsourcing.” Which raises a troubling but also thrilling prospect: the offshoring rush of the past decade or more—one of the signature economic events of our times—may have been a mistake.

People Working Together IN THE SAME PHYSICAL LOCATION to Innovate a New Product

The gist of Fishman's article is that markets move too quickly now for manufacturers to outsource production. To evolve a product at the speed consumers expect, companies need to draw on the skills of all the people involved in the production process--from engineers to line workers to sales people.

And as great as web collaboration software is, as helpful as Skype calls can be, companies are seeing the most benefit by putting people together physically--not virtualy--to reeeningeer old processes and innovate new products.

Fishman has some great examples of how this works in the real world. He tells one story of how a team of GE employees in the U.S. got together and reimagined how to build a dishwasher. When they were finished, they had eliminated 35 percent of the labor required to build one.

Less, but Smarter, Use of Labor
That's pretty amazing. But what is even more stunning is what they did with that extra 35 percent. GE management asked the team to pick a dishwasher part they thought they could build better here in the U.S. They chose a part, reinvented and improved it, and then went on to try to improve other parts.

And that, Fishman says, is how "the outsourcing cycle starts to turn. Once you begin making the product itself, you get the itch to make the parts, too."

How cool is that: The turn of the cycle from outsourcing to insourcing. This change points to the importance of innovation, of real-time collaboration across teams. I can't help but imagine one of these teams in a room, with MINDMAP up on the wall, brainstorming how to "build a better mousetrap."

Can Your Company Do Better Through Cross-Team Collaboration?
This global turn of events is pretty exciting for companies like CS Odessa, which has always believed in the power of creative people working together to solve business challenges.

So what about you? Does your company outsource? What would happen if you started manufacturing your products right here in the U.S... if you put your U.S. workers together to help them innovate the next product. You would be in some very good company if you gave it a try!

Note: Fishman's article provides a number of other very tangible reasons why the insourcing trend is gaining strength here in the U.S.

Visit www.conceptdraw.com to see how our products can help your teams innovate.