Views on Video
Over at the Enterprise 2.0 blog, Melanie Turek presses for companies to be more aggressive in replacing the inconveniences and indignities of air travel with more video meetings and remote work.
And on his blog, Phil Edholm of Nortel writes about the utility of high-definition, big-screen video for group meetings as well.
Finally, I had a chance to do a podcast interview today with Chris Thompson, Senior Director, Solutions Marketing at Cisco (which we'll be posting shortly). I asked Chris whether he saw telepresence and video as a way for enterprises to avoid subjecting its employees to the rigors of travel. His view was a bit more nuanced; nobody likes to travel as it is, he said (I'm paraphrasing). The real value of video, whether it's desktop or telepresence or anything in between, according to Chris, is the opportunity to involve people who otherwise wouldn't be involved at all in a meeting, or to involve them in ways they wouldn't have before.
That was how Chris explained the Gore-Chambers telepresence keynote from last month's VoiceCon Orlando. As great an event as VoiceCon is (he graciously remarked), it'd probably have been tough to corral both Al Gore and John Chambers to be on the stage there at the same time (carbon footprint issues aside). It's less an avoidance issue than an opportunity issue.
This makes sense to me, although I do think there's something to the travel avoidance issue, both in terms of the newest snafus, which Melanie writes about, but also in terms of the sheer efficiencies of not losing so much of a key employee's time in transit.
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