Stu Downes

David Farrell, Vice President, IBM Software Europe

IBM presented a mixture of slides, demonstration and screen capture:

• UC is not a cost saving, its a business value and need to exploit business processes
• IBM aim to unify the experience.  How do you find and expert, reach an expert, collaborate effectively
• Demonstration of screen sharing from within a chat
• Demonstration of CISCO Unity for voicemail in Sametime, Quickr plugin, communties plugin
• (?Re-?)Announced that Sametime unified telephony available Q4
• IBM will retain relationship with PBX suppliers and not try to replace their solutions [obvious difference in strategy to Microsoft]
• Then we had a screen captured demo of the telephony client, there were obvious network issues in the conference room and I felt a little sorry for IBM not being able to live demo.
• Key slides:

 

Speaker – Joe Burton, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Unified Communications, Cisco Joe delivered a session which flowed as follows:

• Focus on the world is flat, but now crowded, and increasingly the spotlight is on IT to deliver even if it is a non-standard application.
• 17% of CISCO workforce use Macs, CISCO IT doesn’t support or pay for Macs, consumerisation message.
• End points for unified communications are increasing.  End points may be anywhere.  2 key drivers are cheap multimedia chipsets with UC capability and virtualisation.
• CISCO spend 25% of their development budgets on interoperability.
• Discussed CISCO thinking on tiered solution UC >> Video >> web 2.0 building together to a collaborative platform.

Example 1 : UC improves process for service / repair industry:

• Customer calls
• Telephony system integrated with salesforce.com to bring up customer details
• Call handler takes customers fault information
• To increase screen estate the cisco phone shows the map with the nearest available engineer

Example 2 : Coca Cola improve warehouse operations:

Old system:

• Order slips on paper
• Pickers (fork lift drivers) take paper and collect order
• Take order to checkers who validate
• Loaded to lorry
• Go
• 78% accurate

UC way:

• No paper
• No checkers
• Fork lift drivers get audio instructions over headset to go to particular place in warehouse
• Validation codes via audio to confirm correct location
• Then instructions on what to collect
• Then load on lorry
• 99.8% accurate
• Reduced traffic movements and accidents in warehouse
• Ability to move fork lift operators who are loading lorries for outward delivery to one area of the warehouse allowing the operators who stock the warehouse to efficiently re-stock

 

Microsoft presented and demonstrated Office Communication Server release 2 today at VoiceCon, in tandem they hit the press.  Eric Swift announced the new release and the key elements I noted were:

• Audio conferencing capabilities from within OCS.
• Ability to dial in from any telephone not just OCS attached devices
• Communicator client support for video up to high definition quality
• Delegation support for telephony (secretary / manager scenarios)
• Attendant client allowing for switchboard style control of calls and grouping of people to help route calls
• Attendant shows call queues and historic information about callers
• Web access to OCS meetings without need for live meeting client – then used web meeting to call the user on a standard telephone to link that web user to the audio
• Screen sharing from within the Communicator client.
• API’s available

Attendant Client

Looking Forward

The stated aim from Microsoft was to remove the requirement for the PBX.

For those with CSC GlobalPass ID’s I’m going to publish more detailed information, with more comment rather than observation, into the Collaborative Wiki space.

More images are available in my Flickr Set for the event.

 

I’m lucky to be spending the bulk of this week at VoiceCon.  Today was tutorials and a round of keynotes.  The keynotes were from:

- Eelco Block (KPN)

- Gerhard Otterbach (Siemens)

- Eric Swift (Microsoft)

KPN’s Eelco Block was the platinum sponsor of the event and used the session to inform the audience of the KPN/Getronics offerings, positioning the services they offered and describing their Human 2.0 offering, reflecting the increased nature of remote working and more typical information style of workers:

Siemen’s Gerhard Otterbach talked about their organisational differentiation, their view on UC, on the changing workforce before focusing on Openscape and their offering in the UC field:

He then went on to announce at the conference their new mobile extensions to this offering which extended the reach of their products to a comprehensive list of mobile devices.

For those with CSC GlobalPass ID’s I’m going to publish more detailed information, with more comment rather than observation, into the Collaborative Wiki space.

For the Microsoft Keynote see my next blog post!

More images are available in my Flickr Set for the event.

 

Made me smile when I plugged the power in last night.  Although you never know, this may be commonplace in 5 years.

 

A lot of my work doesn’t rely on a fixed location and as with many of us required me to maximise productivity when on the road.  Here are the common things I carry around with me:

Technical bits

• BlackBerry 8800, couldn’t be half as effective during travel without this – knocking emails, scheduling tasks and contacting people while waiting for trains, planes etc.
• Standard wired headset and bluetooth headset for the Blackberry
• X60 Tablet – I’m a real tablet fan as it gives me the widest choice of input types and is much more acceptable in physical meetings than having a screen open.
• A spare battery (and if possible charged!) so as to last a day if at conferences.
• Mobile data card (invaluable!)
• A portable mouse, the Logitech VX Nano.  I would not be without this portable mouse now.  The only pain is that I have to unplug the receiver before standby otherwise it wakes the laptop up – not good if like me you prefer not to toast your laptop in your bag.
• A standard telephone headset.  When away I still have to do many conference calls, and you can never find a desk with a headset so I now just take one.  Its really changed my comfort levels during calls and takes minimal room in my bag.
• Logitech presentation wand.  This is worth every penny!  I even find myself using it when talking just using my screen.
• Several USB memory sticks.

Tools I use to stay effective on the road

Corporate stuff (in no particular order):

• Lotus Notes
• Lotus Sametime (IM and presence and sometimes web meetings)
• AT&T Connect for integrated audio and web meetings (my preferred virtual meeting tool)
• CSC’s PC backup and restore service
• Confluence Wiki
• OneNote
• Mindjet Mind Manager Pro
• Logitech Quickcam Pro 9000
• Our Office Communication Server lab environment for one-to-one video calls with team members.

Consumer stuff:

• SkyDrive to share selected files with people
• Twitter – more colleague focused updates
• MSN Messenger and Logitech Quickcam Pro 9000 for calls back to home (I find its really nice to see the family when away – especially when abroad).
• Facebook to keep up-to date with friends (on both web and BlackBerry)
• Googlemail to keep up with personal emails (again on both web and BlackBerry)
• Newsgator Feeddemon
• Twitterberry
• Twhirl
• Ultramon (for when I can find a monitor on travels)

Important non-techie stuff

• Pencils
• Hard backed notebook (even with a tablet I still need pencil and paper at times)
• Travel sickness tablets (tilting express trains and flights sometimes set me off but the tablets control nausea and maintain my effectiveness)
• Flyers about our services.

Desires for the future

• A folding screen
• Better bag storage (thats mainly down to me!)

.

 

Jessica wrote earlier this month about some research and her personal experience which suggests that war rooms and reduced face-to-face activities will result in leaders closing war rooms for collaboration.

“We’re wrapping up a project where we’ve been working with a crack team charged with developing a handbook for leaders who have to work in this new way – across organization, culture, timezones – AND with peers. Command and control, obviously, doesn’t cut it in situations like this so what’s a “virtual leader” to do?

For one thing, get rid of those long-standing war rooms, skunkworks, as per the scent that arises from people working in windowless settings dressed in flip charts and armed with magic markers.”

The survey Jessica referred to was from the Institute of Corporate Productivity:

“more than two-thirds (67%) [of companies surveyed] foresee their reliance on virtual teams mushrooming in importance. In companies with more than 10,000 employees, the virtual team concept jumps to more than 80%.”

Do I agree?

I believe that it depends upon the organisation, the team formed, and the culture.  In some cases the best team possible for a task will be co-located.  We support customers with tens of thousands of people working in offices on the same site.  In those cases a number of war rooms will remain.

In other situations organisations will be large enough to sustain regional sites, and if I consider many of my customers they will have multiple sites in the UK with potential for people to be at a regional site within 2 hours.  If that is the case then war rooms can be adapted to link them between those regional centres and support remote users.  Thus encouraging teams to maintain relationships through regional centres.  You’ll note I use the word maintain because I do feel where possible teams should initiate face-to-face.

The final situations will require completely remote tools and giving everyone a level playing field.  I still remember a phrase Jessica used at the Collaborative Technologies Conference in 2005 which was the “disadvantaged participant”.  Its important in virtual teams that a common baseline is met and those working above that baseline (perhaps being co-located with others) don’t forget the limitations of those on the baseline.

Conclusion

We have 3 key working styles here:

• co-located
• regionally based with very rich collaboration tools
• remotely located with less rich tools

Each will require different leadership styles.  A lot of the tools, methods and processes will be defined by the remit the team has, i.e.:

• do they have travel budget?
• do they have a carbon budget for the project?
• where are the key people?
• the motivation and requirements of the individuals concerned

.

 

Not much of a surprise, and who has a BlackBerry Bold??? Hey come on, own up!

 

The September edition of CSC World has some interesting work from colleagues in the areas of:

• Behavioural adaptation within cross-cultural virtual teams (pdf)
• Managing the multigenerational IT workforce (pdf)
• Developing strategies for successful enterprise collaboration (pdf)

The cross-cultural virtual teams article was really interesting to me, I manage a team like that.  The article was based on some research carried out by Danielle Anawati (CSC) and Annemieke Craig (Deakin University).  Some interesting quotes:

“Team members with different cultural backgrounds
can have communication styles that differ and
can have different ways of conveying information.
This can lead to team members struggling
with cross-cultural communication, as they have
not considered cultural differences nor considered
that this may affect the team’s performance”

The research also included a survey as well as a review of papers.  When we look at how we adapt during meetings, look how we adapt for time zones compared religion, or the way we write:

And when the respondents were asked about the media of communication look how basic most of the communication mechanisms are, and also that 95% of the communication is by email yet almost 40% of respondents made no change to their writing to deal with the cultural differences:

I’d recommend anyone who is part of a cross-cultural remote team to read the research.

The final note I’ll select from the paper and something that is close to what I try and do is to socialise to understand more of the people in my team:

“participants believed socializing was
“important” (Participant 63) and would benefit the
team by opening a “window into the other team
members’ cultures” (Participant 8). Weather, religious
holidays, music, food, movies, personal activities,
priorities, and interesting cultural facts were
suggested as good social topics to assist in cultural
understanding”

Only today I learned something of the festival one of my team would take holiday to attend in November.

 

Verizon recently estimated that:

“a face-to-face meeting is between five and 35 times more expensive than a virtual meeting”.

Graham responded that by commenting on limitations of virtual meetings:

“With all of these limitations I wonder whether the value of many virtual meetings is so low as to make them more expensive than face-to-face meetings.”

Graham also gave the example that:

“In one particular occasion we were working on a technical problem for over three weeks before a face-to-face meeting resolved the problem in under 2 hours.”

I agree face-to-face has a place.  I estimate that I could reduce around 60% of the travel I perform by using:

• HD Video
• Whiteboarding
• Document interaction

The remaining 40% being initial first time meetings, customer meetings or staff sessions where nothing but face-to-face should be used.  I use one short haul return flight about  15 times per year – not counting my other flights and driving for meetings – and I’m not one of the heavier users.  It is about the same as a Manchester – Heathrow return.  The chart shows information from atmosfair.de and estimates 1 flight, the 15 flights I take, after reducing flights and compares the fact that effectively my flights today are equivalent to an additional car.

When considering the cost of a meeting, the value of a meeting, we should also consider the impact of a meeting.  I wonder how long it will be before there is a cultural tipping point, when will it be frowned upon to travel to a meeting?  Longer term will this lead to a reduction in travel?  I hope so because I’d much rather be sat here at home typing this than in an airport or on a flight.