REAL-TIME FIELD AND ONSITE
COMMUNICATIONS SYSTEM
When the Health Officers
Association of California needed a real-time communications
system, they
turned to Direct Technology.
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AUTOMATION OF COMPLEX OPERATIONS
PROCESSES
The California Human
Development Corporation was spending excess time on antiquated,
paperwork-heavy processes. Direct Technology automated their operations.
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BUSINESS TRAVEL IS COSTLY AND OVERRATED
VIRTUAL MEETINGS ARE
JUST AS POWERFUL AT A FRACTION OF THE TIME AND COST
By Fred Michanie, CEO, Direct Technology
I love traveling! Wait a minute – did I just say that? No,
really – I love traveling for pleasure with my family. Sometimes
we go to far away and exotic destinations, and sometimes to a
small campground 30 minutes from home.
As the CEO of a company with offices distributed throughout the
western United States, I find myself in a plane more often than
in my own car. Indeed, I am now writing this blog from my window
seat as I gaze a wondrous eye upon beautiful Mt. Rainier. Of
course I realize that business travel is an extremely important
part of what I do. It’s crucial to visit clients in person, be
onsite to prospect a new business opportunity or meet with
senior executives to develop a major strategic initiative.
Nothing beats a hand shake when it comes to customer and
colleague interaction.
I am also keenly aware that many of the trips that my staff and
I take are project related, and tend to be collaborative by
their very nature. This is vital so that remote team members can
share ideas, develop work plans, edit documents, and create
presentations and other deliverables which define our typical
workday. But, wait a minute: Don’t I run a technology company?
Even more to the point: Didn’t we just win an award for saving
one of our clients almost $2 million last year in travel-cost
avoidance? Sometimes we are so busy helping clients we forget
to look at our own situation.
Taking our own
medicine
About three weeks ago I met with our network architecture
manager (no, I didn’t have to travel for this meeting as we were
at the same location for once). We brainstormed ways to deploy
our collaboration and remote training tools to our internal
staff. We used the same project template that we had been using
for the past dozen or so deployments of the same technology to
companies of similar size. Why hadn’t we done this before?
By the end of the month, we will have iMeeting fully deployed. In the
meantime, management staff has already begun the paradigm shift
from face-to-face to virtual meetings. It’s so simple to use!
Fully integrated into our Outlook calendar, we tell the system
that a meeting will be held in one of our secure virtual rooms
(instead of one of the always-overbooked physical meeting
rooms).
We are believers
The time for our regular executive meeting came and this time we
were all attending virtually. I cautiously entered the virtual
room by clicking on a link provided to me in an Outlook event. I
was a bit nervous: Would I like it? Would it be difficult?
Would I sound funny over the voice-over-IP (VOIP) connection?
I was the first one there – usually I am a few minutes late as I
franticly run from one meeting to the next. Slowly folks begun
to enter the room – their names proudly popped into the
attendees list followed by a shy, “Hello? Can you hear me now?”
We sounded like a wireless commercial.
For those of us privileged enough (or unlucky enough) to have
built in cameras in our laptops an image of ourselves was
prominently streamed for all to see. I loaded the first document
– our agenda – and the meeting began. Some folks were using
headsets and VoIP, others were using landlines and cell phones.
It did not matter as the product magically brought everyone’s
audio together regardless of how they were connected.
The HR director loaded a Word document and proudly shared her
draft with the rest of the group directly from her computer. One
of the participants wanted to make some modifications so she
gave him “editing rights” to her document. He edited her
document from Seattle, even though she was in California! Thirty minutes into the meeting we had
repeated this sharing, editing and collaboration a half a dozen
times, discussing critical items from
accounting to the possible acquisition of a technology company.
Virtual meetings work
as well, or better than, physical meetings
What was fascinating to me is that it seemed we had all
“forgotten” about the fact that we were not in the same room –
that the incredibly complicated technology which included video
over IP, voice over IP, secure collaboration, white boarding,
on-demand voting and application sharing had magically become
the “table” in the conference room. We all appeared to be more
focused and targeted with accomplishing the purpose of the
meeting.
Maybe it was the seriousness of the first virtual event; maybe
it was the fact that nobody had to book travel, pack a suitcase,
negotiate airport security, fight for that non-assigned seat on
the plane, rent a car, etc. Regardless, virtual meetings have
now become a regular part of our internal communications and
project rhythms.
I will still fly to see my clients, but if my CFO’s projection
for travel related cost-savings holds true – I am going to
Brazil with the family this year. And that is one trip I don’t
mind at all.
for more information
about virtual meeting technology, or the i-meeting solution, contact fred at (916) 787-2200 u.s. pst.
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