Virtual Collaboration

There's
nothing to beat a face-to-face meeting. But that's not a luxury we can have
now. With teams dispersed all over the city, country or the world, we now meet
on conference calls. Many, especially in the government, work with video
conferencing, while many others in the IT, consulting and BFSI sectors have
taken to Web conferencing. For many of them, travel costs have come down,
collaboration has improved and there are shorter project cycles, and even
happier customers.

Look at the numbers.
Frost & Sullivan puts the advanced collaboration tools market in India at
$6.5 mn, and predicts that the market will touch $18.3 mn by 2008. While Gartner
says that the world-wide Web conferencing and team-based collaboration market
currently stands at $680 mn and will reach $1.1 bn by 2008.

One of the most
important tools for virtual collaboration is web conferencing. It is slowly
coming around to be a force to reckon with. And why not. A Web conference can
actually manage to do all that you do in a physical meeting, and do some of it
infinitely better. You could speak to your entire sales team, wherever they are.
They can see you.

You can give a
presentation, share with them relevant stuff you find on the Net, and
collaborate on documents. You can take a quick on-the-fly poll of your team
members. You can even run your sales application and have your entire team
looking in. And you don't have to worry much about the minutes of the
meeting-you can record the entire meeting for editing or playing back later.
All this, with you sitting at your desk, your team at theirs, with just your
browsers seemingly doing all the work.

Today there are many
many Web conferencing software solutions available from which one can choose-WebEx
leads the pack. Then there's Microsoft Live Meeting, IBMs Lotus Same Time,
Cisco's Meeting Place, Macromedia's Breeze...

And going by what the
various vendors have to say, there are a lot of savings in the offing. Microsoft
customer, XRT, claims to have saved $145,000 in six months on travel costs.
WebEx's customer Lawson, a global software company, deployed a solution for
its support center and has seen reduction in the average call handling time of
complex calls by 25%. The company goes so far as to say that they save close to
$600,000 per year.

But, for companies
testing the waters with conferencing tools, there are some issues to tackle.

People who are used to
seeing each other, crack jokes, and build a rapport, do not find it very easy to
collaborate with people they have never seen. To that extent, the problem is not
technology but sociology.

People who depend a
lot on reading facial expressions and body language, find it difficult to be a
great participant in a conference call. And if you're dealing with people from
different cultures and time zones, things get even more complicated.

Virtual collaboration
needs a certain amount of 'retraining' of the human mind. The onus is on the
company and leaders to push the concept and make people comfortable with it.

The potential of Web
conferencing and other collaboration tools is huge. What is lacking today
however is an understanding and acceptance of the technology and its use. Web
conferencing tools can lead to rich interactions combining voice, data and
visuals in a seamless manner for business critical applications-without time
constraints.

Conferencing
service providers need to push up their marketing efforts now. There are many
teams out there living on instant messengers, struggling for better, easier,
secure and reliable ways to collaborate. They need to be convinced that there
are better tools available.