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| Conferencing - the business requirement |
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Beyond the conference call
The humble conference call is an unloved but unavoidable fixture of modern working life. It is a simple product of the fact that you cannot be in more than one place at a time; but while it (usually) gets the job done, everyone is familiar with the problems that have to be overcome.
It can be difficult to work out who is speaking. You lose track of who is actually taking part in the meeting. You cannot tell whether your fellow participants are paying attention. You drift off yourself. And, quite simply, it takes a lot of hard work just to manage the meeting. |
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The web conferencing explosion
A number of new technological solutions to the conferencing problem have emerged, and most recently the greatest success has been for "web conferencing" solutions such as those provided by WebEx, LiveMeeting, and a large number of other vendors. These products allow conference call participants to share documents and applications, so that in addition to talking participants can show presentations and work together on spreadsheets and other documents.
The huge success of these products has shown how desperately organizations need better conferencing tools, but for all its success web conferencing only solves half the problem. With its focus on sharing data, it cannot address the need for improved interpersonal, soft, communications. Indeed, web conferencing risks exacerbating one of modern work's less pleasant features - that of "death by PowerPoint". |
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The "failure" of video conferencing
Videoconferencing has been a realistic solution for over a decade, yet very few organisations are truly positive about the experience it has delivered. Poor quality; difficult to set up; specialist, incompatible hardware; videoconferencing is often judged to have been a failure.
In fact, despite its acknowledged drawbacks, organizations spend several billion dollars every year on videoconferencing. A successful organization is based on people working well together - and that means communicating well with each other. For all its problems, videoconferencing has been the only solution addressing the interpersonal communications issues in distributed meetings. |
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The real requirement
What is truly needed is a solution which allows participants in distributed meetings to get a real sense of being there together even when they are physically apart - a shared experience of meeting and interacting together in an intuitive, immersive way.
And this solution should be built in such a way that it is suitable for deployment throughout the organization, integrating into your enterprise systems, and for the sort of regular team meetings which are the lifeblood of successful organizations.
This solution is the AliceStreet Conference Center. |
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