Microsoft Visio

Microsoft Visio is a program that allows you to create visual diagrams based on information, statistics, processes, or anything else. The program provides you with an intuitive layout, easy to use templates, connectivity to actual data, and much more. It is a simple way to visually display any process or information that may be confusing to people outside of your department or business area.

I work in marketing and we use Visio in my organization to help simplify statistics as we present them to "clients." We operate our marketing department that treats the other lines of business the way an agency would treat a client, including monthly update meetings. In these meeting, when needed, we use Visio to pull results from excel documents to display the data visually so that anyone can understand it.

We also use it to outline a new process. About a year ago my old boss was let go and instead of hiring a replacement the senior management team decided to realign our department with the business development team to form one Sales Marketing team. Once the change was implemented we needed to explain the new department to the rest of the organization. We used Visio to build a mini organization chart for our department that we could provide to the building.

This would benefit any organization because most people can understand anything better visually. It would save time and money of employees explaining information multiple times, or save money by cutting by on errors if everyone understands the direction from the first time due to a detailed visual provided by Visio.