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Better than being there?

By Toni Kistner
Net.Worker, 06/11/01

One silver lining to this cloudy economy is that excessive business travel is dead. The days when you jumped on a plane for every meeting, logged millions of frequent flyer miles, and lamented missed ballgames and birthdays has gone the way of the three-martini lunch.

Because fat travel budgets were an early casualty, global companies began experimenting with Web-based meeting services to bring workers together virtually. And today, they're hooked. Revenue for the Web-based collaboration tools market is expected to top $62 million by year-end, climbing to $797 million by 2007, according to a recent Frost & Sullivan report.

Services from PlaceWare, WebEx, Raindance (formerly Evoke Communications) and others provide dedicated meeting space on their servers - attendees click on a URL and "meet" at a shared Web space. You can give a presentation, take a poll, collaborate on a document, demonstrate an application, give a tour of a Web site or teach a class. And you can invite just a few, or hundreds, of attendees.

Virtual meetings are old hat to Rich Hoeg, Honeywell's manager for technical education and internal engineering services. Because the aerospace and controls manufacturer is in the throes of being acquired by General Electric, chief among Hoeg's responsibilities is to ensure the company's newly combined 450,000-member work-- force has access to the company intranet and other critical resources by July 12, when the merger is expected to be approved by the federal government.

"Going through a merger with GE, you throw many people together, and realize the only way that you're going to survive is with Web conferencing tools," he says.

Hoeg's first assignment was to help the dispersed members of Honeywell's research and development group share information with product testers located in various manufacturing plants. After a few in-person meetings, the group began using PlaceWare to give presentations and collaborate on projects. "Before the meeting, people upload their slides, and the boss puts up the agenda. If needed, someone can fire up the software and do a demo," Hoeg says.

While PlaceWare and other tools let members collaborate on documents and applications simultaneously - sharing control of the screen and whiteboarding feature - Hoeg's group finds it's most productive when individual work is done offline in Word documents, then cut and pasted into the PlaceWare text slide for sharing.

Hoeg says what's missing is the ability to see team members' facial expressions. "When you can't see one another, you have to be strong-willed. It's not like in a physical room where it's obvious who is dominant. Voice inflection is very important, too, but is hard to pick up unless team members work together often."

Medical equipment manufacturer Medtronic uses WebEx to connect its 25,000 employees worldwide. Teams use Web conferencing for training sessions, brainstorming, product development, weekly status meetings, biweekly status reviews and spontaneous meetings with vendors and partners.

While most Medtronic em-ployees have taken to what he calls the "new meeting paradigm," Tom Sim-ensen, Medtronic's IT research manager has met some resistance. Some employees say they're self-conscious of taking control of a meeting, others complain they're on technology overload and don't want to learn another software program, and still others insist they're more comfortable in face-to-face meetings.

Andy Holdgate, vice president of corporate communications for High Speed Access, a Colorado cable access provider, says his company's 120 field-based workers use conferencing services from Raindance for monthly virtual meetings. But Holdgate admits these are primarily show-and-tell affairs in which the CEO delivers company updates, different department's news is highlighted and new employee benefits are unveiled.

Most companies, like High Speed Access, still use them for blasting out PowerPoint presentations to a passive audience. That's a shame, according to Jaclyn Kostner, an expert on virtual teams and author of the forthcoming book Bionic eTeamwork.

Virtual teams that master Web conferencing and collaboration tools can be more productive and accomplish tasks faster than if they had gathered in person, she says.

"This is a breakthrough for many teams," Kostner says. "Every vote counts the same. No one is above anyone else."