Merge

The whiteboard is a great thinking tool. But it has an inherent flaw: Information Importability. I think I just made that word up. But in essence, a whiteboard is like Vegas: What happens on a whiteboard, typically stays on a whiteboard. It is extremely time intensive to re-record good information on a whiteboard, and sometimes impossible depending on the current content. Here are some ways that Merge addresses this problem:

Take a picture. I'll use my camera phone and take a picture of a whiteboard session. This proves extremely valuable if you have multiple whiteboards going. It also keeps your whiteboards clean. One tendency is not to want to erase a whiteboard because it has some really good info on it. Take a picture, print it out, a viola, you have your mini-whiteboard replicated and you're free to erase away!

Other benefits of taking a picture:
-It allows you to share that information with others. You can email the picture, print the picture, etc. and distribute. I've used this several times to great affect off site. I was with a consultant who was doing some great whiteboarding that had information extremely valuable to me. Two quick clicks of my camera phone and the information was mine forever. Another example is where I did a whiteboarding session for a group and one member really needed the information. When she got home, the information was in her inbox and she was ecstatic.

-If you save the picture to a hard drive, it provides permanent storage. Once a whiteboard is wiped, the information is gone. Taking a picture makes a permanent record.

A camera can tend to have the same problem as a whiteboard. It's easy to take a picture, but getting it off the camera can sometimes be laborious. Other than connecting it to your computer, hunting for the image and then trying to find the directory on your computer, I do this:

Email the picture to yourself.

-Use Evernote.com, a service that allows you to index your notes, even pictures. Evernote is a slick application for the Blackberry and iPhone that allows you to do image notes, voice notes, etc. Simply fire up Evernote, take the picture, select save and then record a tag or two and you're all set. You can also email your information out of Evernote to share. Think of it as a centralized online repository for all of your whiteboard sessions.

Other Knowledge Transfer Tools
Merge uses whiteboards for many reasons, but one is to plan web solutions. So we're doing sitemaps, wireframes and web application planning. To transfer that knowledge into a document we use gliffy.com, a flow-chart like program. Occasionally we'll use mind-mapping software as well. One thing we are considering is to forgo the whiteboard *gasp* and use a wacom tablet for sitemap and wireframe creation (anywhere from $250 - $750) -- as it can take hours to recreate a wireframe in gliffy which only took 10 minutes to draw.

So there you have it. Hopefully this helps you untrap your whiteboard information. And one last free bit of advice: This works for flip charts as well.

**Please note, I know there are Smart Boards out there that can electronically capture the information, but they're somewhat expensive and limited to one board--as Merge has 20 boards around the office, they aren't ideal. But if you have any suggestions, we'd love to hear them.