Crowdsourcing Questions in the Social Studies Classroom

Click here and enter into a wonderful classroom project. @vtdeacon is putting this together as a "Crowdsourcing Questions" project.

Personally, I'm so excited about this sort of thing.

We've had such a good time the last few weeks in my 9th grade West Civ class running our syllabus as a crowdsourced document -- and we'd love you to stop on by after you leave a question or two on @vt's wiki.

Collaboration. It's a beautiful thing.

TelePresence Gains Momentum at Retailer Show

The National Retail Federation (NRF) released its 2010 economic forecast, projecting retail industry sales to increase 2.5 percent from last year. In contrast, total industry retail sales for 2009 had actually declined by 2.5 percent.

"As we continue to see signs of improvement throughout the U.S. economy in 2010, overall sentiment will begin to lift, making way for slight increases in consumer spending," said NRF Chief Economist Rosalind Wells.

While this past year certainly has been a challenging one for most retailers, they continue to seek out ways to apply business technology that helps to transform both their in-store communications and the way they interact and collaborate with their primary suppliers.

Earlier this month, the NRF 2010 "Big Show" attendees were able to once again experience Cisco TelePresence systems and AT&T services in action. The above video includes insights from some of the people who shared their perspective about how business video adoption will positively impact their customer experience and operational productivity.

TelePresence Provides Competitive Edge
"Telepresence gives us something up on the competition, by being able to leverage the expertise that we have in one of our stores, and now use it across an entire region" said David Bash, CIO at Nebraska Furniture Mart, after participating in the AT&T Telepresence Solution demonstration.

To thrive in today's economy, you have to be able to collaborate with colleagues, partners, and customers around the globe at a moment's notice. At the same time, you need to conduct your business in such a way that it enhances the quality of your key relationships.

In 2010, we'll likely see more creative applications of visual conferencing technology, as borderless collaboration continues to mainstream across all manufacturing industries and commercial service sectors.

Business Social Networking Upside-Downside

Social media tools are entering the workplace, either by thoughtful intent or purely by accident. To date, for those organizations that actually have a plan of action, most tend to focus more on "damage containment" policies for their employees.

Is a protection-centric strategy the prudent approach for concerned -- but otherwise uninformed -- business leaders, or is it shortsighted thinking that undervalues the upside opportunity?

Cisco released the results of a third-party global market study designed to assess how organizations use consumer social networking tools to collaborate externally.

The use of these tools, such as Facebook and Twitter, are connecting organizations with their external stakeholders. On the upside, the tools connect people and information, establish potential new routes to market, and enhance customer intimacy and brand awareness.

According to the third-party researcher, the study findings indicate that we're at the early stages of adoption and in the process of identifying key challenges -- such as the need for increased governance and IT involvement.

Market Study Highlights
Of the organizations interviewed, 75 percent identified social networks as the consumer-based social media tools they primarily use, while roughly 50 percent of the group also identified extensive use of microblogging.

Social networking tools are spreading into core business areas, including marketing, human relations, and customer service. Within marketing and communications, these tools have already become an integral part of early-adopter initiatives.

Small and medium-sized businesses are actively using social networking channels to generate sales leads, but this remains a growth opportunity for larger companies.

Only one in seven of the companies that participated in the research noted a formal process associated with adopting consumer-based social networking tools for business purposes.

Only one in five participants identified any policies in place concerning the use of consumer-based social networking in the enterprise. Within the respondent base, social networking governance typically involves more stakeholders than standard corporate initiatives.

Due to the unstructured nature of social networking, companies continue to struggle with policy creation and adoption, as copying an established governance process from other more structured areas often doesn't work for social networking.

Only one in 10 respondents noted direct IT involvement in externally facing social networking initiatives. Although IT typically isn't involved as a primary decision maker, respondents did recognize the need for these tools to scale and properly integrate with existing business processes to reap maximum benefits.

The new study is based on extensive interviews with 105 participants representing 97 organizations in 20 countries around the globe. Conducted between April and September 2009, the research was carried out by leading business schools in the United States and Europe.

oGoing is Live! Introducing oGoing : "Twitter for Enterprise"

"oGoing is Live! I am excited to launch a brand new social + business networking service for business users who want to connect, communicate & collaborate with their co-workers, peers, teams, customers, partners & prospects now!" Sanjay Dalal, founder, oGoing. "oGoing provides a robust social networking platform for the Enterprise."

oGoing connects You with Your co-workers through the exchange of frequent answers to one question: "What's going on?" In real-time!

oGoing is the most innovative social + business networking service in the marketplace today for sending and sharing real-time updates with your co-workers worldwide now!

Using oGoing, you can update, reply and share with co-workers frequent answers to one question: "What's going on?" oGoing provides a social + business media platform wherein you and your co-workers talk about what's going on in their work, projects, deals and more...in real-time.

oGoing - What's going on? Stay in touch. Join the conversation.

oGoing Features

Go to: http://www.ogoing.com to sign up and get started today, and join oGoing colleagues from all over the world, and begin sharing your updates now! oGoing provides a delivery platform for sharing information in real-time.

If you already have a Twitter account, that's Great! On oGoing, you can share all your Twitter updates with your oGoing friends.

But wait, there's more... On oGoing, you can setup multiple accounts with various user names, and link them together! This way, you can send updates to all your followers on all accounts at once, or choose which specific accounts to send updates to...Cool!!

When you have that really long URL to share, and it takes up all the space in the update area... no more!! On oGoing, you can attach your URL separately (long or short), and it will appear on your update... and you still have all the space you need to write your update!! Very cool!!

oGoing even allows you to share the updates you love the most from your co-workers (or your own), and even share updates you like the most with your co-workers. You can easily track the most shared updates, most liked updates, and the most talked about updates... Is that cool or what?

On oGoing, you can immediately follow your followers automatically, and send an automatic personalized message to your followers as they begin to follow you... how cool is that!!

But what if I want to send my updates to my specific peers only, and don't want the rest of my followers to see them... no problem! On oGoing, you can include your peers in your own Group... so the next time you have something important to share, only let your special friends on your Group know about this! Ultra cool!!

oGoing For Business

oGoing is innovative and ready for your business!!

If you are a business, you want to setup your own oGoing Business Portal now. When you setup your business profile on Twitter or other social networks: You cannot control your followers, you cannot control your branding, you cannot keep some of your updates private, you cannot create programs away from your competitor's eyes, you cannot give access to all your employees, you cannot create one-to-one updates for your key customers or partners, you cannot avoid spammers. Would you want your business to operate under this environment?

On oGoing, we setup oGoing for your own business with a unique website created just for your business, for example,"mybiz.ogoing.com". At your oGoing For Business website, only your business, your employees, your team members can share updates with each other, or share updates with your customers or partners - privately, or publicly!! It's your own oGoing portal where you can brand it, customize it, monitor it, and manage it... Imagine your sales leaders sharing updates with their team members, your marketing team sharing the latest news about your product launch, your CEO sharing the company vision & highlights, your customer service team hand-holding their customers, your business development team working hand-in-hand with your partners, and more. oGoing provides your own oGoing For Business portal to make all this happen...

Just go here to request your oGoing For Business Portal for a free trial for 60 days - no strings attached.

Request Business Portal

oGoing Team

oGoing is founded by Sanjay Dalal, serial entrepreneur & innovator, and a silicon valley veteran. oGoing Engineers have been working hard to bring oGoing to you (and are still working as you read this)... Contact Us if you are interested in joining oGoing Team.

New Normal: Bold IT-Based Business Agility

European business leaders believe their companies are more vulnerable to IT-enabled market disruptions than companies in other parts of the world, according to a new market study by McKinsey & Company.

McKinsey found that 74 percent of European business leaders believed their company was 'very' or 'extremely' exposed to IT-based market disruption. Regardless, only 18 percent of European IT executives believed their companies were 'very effective' at introducing business technology faster and better than their competitors.

According to the McKinsey assessment, European companies need to grasp the opportunity to make bold, transformative moves to ensure their business continues to thrive within the "New Normal" environment of ICT-empowered borderless commerce.

A significant number of businesses have recognized the need to adapt, with 31 percent of European executives saying the development of new products and services in response to changing consumption patterns was a high priority.

'Good Enough' isn't a Winning Strategy
McKinsey believes that the attitude of European business leaders towards IT must shift. Organizations have achieved 'satisfactory' results by attaining some success in improving IT productivity, operational productivity, or innovation.

However, the performance expectation bar is now much higher and "IT must truly excel in all of these dimensions to support a winning company." McKinsey's guidance for European companies includes:

• Align IT and the business, upgrade business skills of IT leaders and close performance gaps.
• Improve governance models to facilitate joint decision making and strategic planning between IT and the business.
• Fundamentally restructure the IT function to dramatically improve productivity.
• Transform the company's operating model and cost structure with IT-enabled business processes.
• Enable transformative moves by promoting a mindset that fosters and rewards experimentation with new ideas.
• Identify opportunities for IT-enabled innovations and be prepared to respond to competitors' disruptive moves.
  

Outlook: Prepare for More of the Same
McKinsey says companies have begun to recognize that the current recession is not simply another turn of the business cycle but a restructuring of the economic order -- and that they need to look beyond relieving short-term cost pressures.

In summary, the current economic environment should be treated as the benchmark conditions for the foreseeable future. Where's the upside opportunity? Become that 'agent' of change.

McKinsey research has shown that downturns are times when industry leadership often changes. Forty-eight percent of global IT companies and 40 percent of U.S. industrial companies that were leaders before the 2000-01 recession did not retain their leadership positions afterward.

The Virtual Computing Environment Coalition

Worldwide spending on data center technology infrastructure and services exceeds $350 billion annually, according to McKinsey and Company estimates, with half of that spent on capital expenses and half on operating expenses.

Further, an estimated 70 percent or more of those costs are expended to maintain existing infrastructures, leaving 30 percent or less for new technology initiatives and applications that can provide breakthrough differentiation for businesses.

It is also estimated that approximately $85 billion, or 20 percent of this total market, can be addressed with data center virtualization and private cloud technology by 2015.

Cisco and EMC, together with VMware, have introduced the Virtual Computing Environment coalition, an unprecedented collaboration of three information technology (IT) industry leaders.

Virtual Computing Environment Coalition Charter
The coalition has been created to accelerate customers' ability to increase business agility through greater IT infrastructure flexibility, and lower IT, energy and real estate costs through pervasive data center virtualization and a transition to private cloud infrastructures.

Cisco, EMC and VMware have worked closely over the past year on a shared vision for the future of enterprise IT infrastructure -- private cloud computing. A private cloud is a virtual IT infrastructure that is securely controlled and operated solely for one organization.

It can be managed either by that organization or a third party, and it can exist on- or off-premise -- or in combination. Private cloud computing offers the controls and security of today's data center with the agility required for business innovation at substantially lower costs.

The Virtual Computing Environment coalition offers organizations of all sizes an accelerated approach to data center transformation with dramatic efficiencies that promise significant reductions in both capital and operating expenses. As a result, organizations will no longer have to choose between best-of-breed technologies and end-to-end vendor accountability.

Ecosystem Collaboration and Open Innovation
The Virtual Computing Environment coalition already has partners committed to the coalition. This includes representation from the entire partner ecosystem, including systems integrators, value added resellers, service providers, and independent software vendors.

Culture is Key to Advanced Collaboration

Organizations that deploy the most advanced Internet protocol-based collaboration technologies achieve more than twice the return on their collaboration investment and perform better than their less collaborative peers, according to a thought-provoking Frost & Sullivan market study.

"Meetings Around the World II: Charting the Course of Advanced Collaboration," sponsored by Verizon and Cisco, examines how busy professionals in businesses and government agencies use advanced collaboration tools such as voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP), instant messaging or meeting via high definition video or Cisco TelePresence to get their work done.

The study is the first to develop a model for measuring a return on collaboration investment, the Return on Collaboration (ROC) Index. It establishes a progressive impact of deploying advanced Unified Communications and Collaboration (UC&C) technologies on business performance and measures improvements in areas such as research and development, human resources, sales, marketing, investor relations and public relations.

Advanced Collaborators Harness Competitive Advantage
The study also identified emerging business technology adoption trends and attitudes across the globe. Key findings from the study include:

• Businesses and government agencies deploying increasingly more sophisticated collaboration tools -- such as VoIP soft phones, immersive video and fixed mobile convergence -- saw a corresponding improvement in business results relative to the amount invested.
• The overall average ROC score was 4.2 -- meaning organizations received an average return of four times their investment in deploying collaboration technologies.
• The majority of organizations deploying UC&C report they are more successful than their peers compared to those not deploying UC&C (70 percent versus 47 percent).
• Of organizations deploying UC&C, 40 percent plan to increase spending.
• VoIP is leading the way for delivery of advanced communications and collaboration applications.
  

Why Corporate Culture is a Defining Factor
If you're thinking that simply deploying online collaboration tools will deliver results similar to the leaders -- then think again. Your work environment is truly instrumental to success.

How do the Advanced Collaborators attain an ROC score of 6.1? These organizations tend to have "open" entrepreneurial corporate cultures where individuals are accessible, and there's regular cooperation between business units.

"Meetings Around the World II confirms and extends the key findings of the original study and builds on those conclusions. This latest research shows adopting progressively more advanced unified communications and collaboration tools can help organizations achieve a corresponding return on collaboration and improvement across all business functions. This return was most dramatic in the areas of sales, marketing and research and development" says Brian Cotton, vice president for Information and Communications Technologies for Frost & Sullivan.

Managed IT Enhances JetBlue Business Model

New York-based JetBlue Airways created an airline focused on value, service and style. They've proven to be a trailblazer in the U.S. airline industry. They're also a communication technology early-adopter. JetBlue introduced complimentary in-flight e-mail and instant messaging services on their aircraft -- a first among U.S. domestic airlines.

However, their core competency is centered upon air travel. They out-task the rest to service providers, wherever possible.

JetBlue signed a new, six-year strategic agreement with Verizon Business to manage the airline's information technology ( IT) data center and communications network needs, as well as provide security and IT consulting services.

Built on an IP Network Foundation
Verizon Business will design and manage the transition of JetBlue's existing systems to a new global IT network infrastructure. The newly built Internet-protocol-based (IP) voice and data network will support state-of-the-art airport kiosks, wireless Internet access and an advanced reservation system.

"JetBlue has built a reputation of consistently providing excellent customer service," said JetBlue CIO Joe Eng. "The agreement with Verizon Business to strengthen our IT capabilities is further proof that we are taking the steps necessary to evolve our business to meet our customers' changing needs. With this enhanced IT infrastructure, JetBlue will be even better positioned for the future."

The new converged voice and data network will help support JetBlue's vision to deliver enhanced customer service and better collaborative tools for its employee crewmembers.

Verizon Business will connect JetBlue crewmembers, customers and partners to each other and the Internet. The infrastructure will serve as the foundation to deliver new customer and collaboration services -- including audio, net and video conferencing and enhanced contact center applications that will enable JetBlue's reservations agents to better serve customers.

Securing and Protecting Critical Data
Verizon Business will also manage the transition of JetBlue's data centers to Verizon's redundant managed service centers. In addition, they will manage the critical infrastructure components of JetBlue's internal systems including its data centers, voice and data networks and internal service desk -- ensuring continuous availability and improved resiliency and reliability.

Through its managed security practice, Verizon Business will help safeguard critical company data as well as ensure JetBlue meets strict industry requirements for secure credit card transactions online, over the phone and at the airport.

JetBlue currently serves 58 cities with 650 daily flights. In 2009, the carrier ranked "Highest in Customer Satisfaction Among Low-Cost Carriers in North America" by J.D. Power and Associates.

The Secret of Business Growth in 2010

Having had their fill of the economic downside, business leaders are truly ready for the eventual upside. Apparently, U.S. companies are preparing for a global economic recovery to begin in the first half of 2010, according to a new "Road to Growth" market study from AT&T.

Key study findings include the following insights:

Business Agility and ROI Pressures
In today's economic climate, U.S. companies have significantly shortened the time frame over which a Return on Investment (ROI) is delivered.

More than half of U.S. IT executives stated they are under pressure to deliver a return on investment in half the time than their previous efforts. As a result, two-thirds cited that the change has affected their IT budgets, strategies and priorities.

The study found that companies are less willing to invest in longer-term projects -- where the return does not come quickly. One CIO stated that IT projects must give at least a 100% ROI in 12 months -- otherwise, the project is terminated.

Shrinking Costs, While Growing the Upside
No surprise, regarding the top-of-mind challenges. Cost cutting and increasing revenue remain the two primary business goals. To achieve those objectives, survive the recession and move towards growth, business technology strategies are focused on:

Reducing operating costs: 87 percent cited "reducing operating costs" as "extremely or very important." Improve collaboration with customers and partners: 85 percent cited "improved collaboration with customers and partners" as "extremely or very important." Enhancing workforce performance and productivity: 83 percent cited "enhancing workforce performance" as "extremely or very important."

Rise of the Any-Term Business Strategy
The study found that U.S. companies employ multiple strategies to address business goals, and do not distinguish between short-term and long-term strategies. It appears that U.S. companies are reducing the time period for their long-term forecasting until after the recession is over.

Moreover, the role IT plays in helping U.S. companies achieve long-term strategies is very similar to the role IT plays in supporting a company's short-term business strategies.

Ongoing Role of Business Technology
IT investments and priorities are very focused in a couple of key areas. The study found that "business continuity and security solutions" will have the biggest positive impact on business growth as U.S. companies prepare for an economic turnaround.

This is closely followed by "enterprise mobility solutions" and "Web delivery solutions." Areas of IT investment that are expected to have a high to moderate impact on businesses are "unified communications services" and "hosted solutions."

For more information, and a copy of the executive summary, visit the AT&T Road to Growth Study on their website.

Increased Productivity Due to Telecommuting

In the global networked economy, work is performed everywhere, at any time and any place. That said, what are the operational benefits? Cisco set out to evaluate the social, economic and environmental impacts associated with allowing and actively enabling employees to telecommute.

Cisco announced the findings of its Teleworker Survey, an in-depth study of almost 2,000 company employees. The study, conducted to evaluate the social, economic and environmental impacts associated with telecommuting at Cisco, revealed that a majority of respondents experienced a significant increase in work-life flexibility, productivity and overall satisfaction as a result of their ability to work remotely.

Create a Sound Telecommuting Strategy
As the modern workforce continues to evolve and globalize, more companies are evaluating a telecommuting strategy to save costs and lower carbon emissions as well as to retain top talent.

For these companies, Cisco's survey highlights the gains that a sound telecommuting strategy provides for employees and employers alike.

Cisco is achieving new levels of efficiency and effectiveness by enabling people to work together no matter where they are located. In fact, according to Cisco's Internet Business Services Group, the company's global strategic consulting arm, the company has generated an estimated annual savings of $277 million in productivity by allowing employees to telecommute and telework.

Examples of Connectivity Solution Adoption
In addition, with the steady adoption of enterprise-class remote connectivity solutions like Cisco Virtual Office, the recently announced Cisco OfficeExtend, and virtual collaboration tools like Cisco WebEx, Cisco anticipates that employees and employers will continue to see a rise in the benefits associated with telecommuting.

Highlights from the study include the following:

• Approximately 69 percent of the employees surveyed cited higher productivity when working remote, and 75 percent of those surveyed said the timeliness of their work improved.
• By telecommuting, 83 percent of employees said their ability to communicate and collaborate with co-workers was the same as, if not better than, it was when working on-site.
• 67 percent of survey respondents said their overall work quality improved when telecommuting.
• An improved quality of life through telecommuting was cited by 80 percent of survey respondents.
• Telecommuting can also lead to a higher employee retention rate, as more than 91 percent of respondents say telecommuting is somewhat or very important to their overall satisfaction.
  

How can your business benefit from these key insights? Bring your people and information together to reduce decision times and accelerate innovation. Develop a strategy to enable open, secure, adaptable enterprise collaboration that improves your company's creativity and velocity.

IT Power Users Will Lead the Way

Have you ever wondered if your company's utilization of Business Technology is in line with the creative market leaders? The Harvard Business Review recently published an interesting commentary by Susan Cramm entitled "How to Support Your IT Innovators."

Ms. Cramm believes that to realize the full potential from business technology, all enterprises need IT-smart business leaders -- up, down, and across the organization.

According to the results of her ongoing survey, however, business leaders apparently don't feel very smart about their IT adoption and application practices.

• Only 11% personally use and fully leverage the capabilities of the technology currently in place.
• 50% agree with the statement that "business leaders don't understand how to use their systems and technologies."
• And, only 25% of business leaders consider themselves "IT-smart."
  

Liberate the Business Technology Innovators
One person she interviewed said "business groups that have somebody on their team who is an IT expert do much better -- in terms of leveraging technology to meet their needs -- than those who do not." While that may not be profound, it's a noteworthy comment.

Tech-savvy business users perform a valuable function for their less-informed peer group. They are able to determine what is truly possible, with current technology. Why? It's because power-users sometimes have better productivity enhancing tools in their home-based office than they do at their place of work.

How can this be possible? Well, IT managers focused on total control of all physical infrastructure are consumed by operational tasks and remedial user support activity. They have little or no time available to research, test and adopt the best-fit productivity tools for their business user needs.

Don’t Assume, Follow the Informed User
Moreover, there's often a major disconnect between what business users say they need, and what their IT team assumes they would apply. Most organizations use only 64 percent of their enterprise systems core functions, according to a recent Accenture survey.

"About half said they don't need all the capabilities, while a fifth explained that they didn't make use of all the functionality due to lack of time to learn how to apply them," said Accenture.

In summary, Ms. Cramm says that you should identify your lead users, give them more of what they really need, free up your IT team's time to study what they are doing (and why), and then decide how to standardize and scale the most promising innovations to benefit the whole enterprise.

Business Video Impact is Far Reaching

Many of the visitors to the AT&T booth at the VoiceCon 2009 are having their first experience of a TelePresence solution in action. Tina Vestal, customer care center manager at CHEP, perhaps sums it up best with her assessment -- "it's amazing!"

Earlier this week, BAE Systems Land and Armaments, part of the third largest defense company in the world, agreed to enhance their global employee collaboration and productivity with the AT&T Telepresence Solution.

BAE Systems will use Telepresence to provide an in-person meeting experience with executive leadership and engineering teams across the U.S., and the United Kingdom. This capability will also be expanded to Sweden, South Africa and other regions in the future.

Their TelePresence applications are intended to be far reaching, across numerous parts of their organization. Live video-based meetings will help them accelerate decision-making processes and problem-solving for high-priority projects.

More Productive Meetings, Less Unproductive Travel
With the anticipated increase in productivity through engineering team collaboration, and frequent management team interactions, the BAE Systems participants will also realize direct operational cost reduction.

AT&T's fully managed service includes in-room equipment, installation, full monitoring and management of the application, network provisioning, remote help desk service and on-site equipment maintenance and repair.

"We anticipate a reduction in travel time, costs, and realize other benefits -- including improved employee safety and quality of life through this environmentally-friendly tool," said Bharat Amin, VP & CIO at BAE Systems Land & Armaments.

BAE Systems is a global company engaged in the development, delivery and support of advanced defense, security and aerospace systems in the air, on land and at sea. They employ 105,000 people, and have customers in over 100 countries worldwide.

Updates:
Also view the Day Two video commentary from demo visitors.

This isn't about saving paper...

A reader writes:

My goal is to convert my whole school and then the district. I know it will take data to prove the savings before the district will spring for more computers.

First off, practical stuff: Connectivity and hardware are going to be your initial expenses. If possible, you should also have a tech person on-hand for repairs and service issues.

Second: All districts are different. Do most of your students have computers already? Or do few? Are your teachers each equipped with a laptop? Or do you have to scramble on your own to flush out tech needs?

Third: Consider this... I don't know exactly what your situation is, but I would suggest going totally paperless in your own classroom first. Then use the leverage it gives you with regard to ease of parent conferences, simplicity of iCal, ongoing assessment via individualized student digital portfolio blogs, etc... to get other teachers onboard. Rather than trying to sell the paperless classroom as a way of 'saving money' on paper, try presenting it to your faculty as a way of making classroom time more effective, grading more time-managable, and student outcomes more authentic and dynamic. Because in the end, this isn't just about saving paper... it's about saving students.

Once the other teachers realize just how effective and easy it is to use a digital classroom, you'll begin to develop a critical mass. That'll wind up being a lot more effective in the long run than just one person trying to do all the work.

This is essentially a collaborative venture we're all embarking upon. No one of us can do this alone. We need that critical mass both to evaluate best practices between each other and to influence the powers-that-be that either they jump on the train with us or take the long walk home alone.

Managed Service Enables Secure Delivery of Intellectual Property

In a global economy, professional services firms must differentiate themselves from their competition in increasingly creative ways. Rockwell Technology Group, a Grand Rapids, Mich.-based software development firm, serves customers across the U.S. Midwest and Canada, including manufacturers, insurance companies, and management services.

Because its customers are widespread, it needed to come up with a way to quickly and securely deliver software updates and patches for systems it had developed. As a way to save both time and money, it uses WebEx Workspace, a hosted extranet service, to post the results of its work for download by customers.

The alternative would be to burn the software onto a CD or DVD and either have it delivered by hand or shipped overnight. But by using WebEx Workspace, Rockwell garners several advantages.

Saving Time, Increasing Security
One advantage is that the software updates, which may be necessary to make a business process more efficient, are immediately available to customers. "As soon as our developers have new custom software ready for delivery, I can call the customer and say, 'download it and you're good to go,'" says Mark Laws, Rockwell Technology Group's chief operating officer. Rockwell doesn't have to send someone to the customer to install the software.

Rockwell's customers also appreciate the increased security. WebEx Workspace uses the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol to ensure protection during transmission, and Rockwell posts software updates in a password-protected folder accessible only to that customer.

Hosted Collaboration Brings Internal Advantages
Rockwell also uses the collaborative workspace internally as well, which helps the company update team members about customer projects.

It stores project-related documents in the hosted Document Manager; it uses the Discussion Forums to carry on impromptu online chats, which are then maintained for later access by other team members; and it maintains schedules and to-do lists using other Workspace capabilities.

Even though Rockwell could just as easily deploy collaborative software internally, it prefers to use WebEx Workspace because of its capacity and convenience. "We have millions of gigabytes stored on the WebEx Workspace," says Laws. "If one of our computers crashes, we don't have to worry about losing any data. We just go to another computer."

If you need to share sensitive information securely, and don't want to worry about maintaining an extensive infrastructure, asking a managed services provider to set up a collaborative workspace can help you focus on serving your customers more productively.

Retailers Upbeat About TelePresence Applications

Companies with extended supply chains frequently need to collaborate with multiple partners -- simultaneously and visually. Yesterday at the National Retail Federation Conference in New York, AT&T and Cisco reminded attendees that they have added multipoint capabilities to their telepresence offering, which AT&T delivers as a managed service.

Attendees visiting AT&T's booth participated in videoconferencing discussions with Cisco employees in San Jose, and expressed confidence that they could apply the teleconferencing capabilities in their business immediately. Collin Cupid of high-end handbags and accessories manufacturer Coach said, "It made you feel like everybody's in the same room."

Sally Curtis of Planet Retail, a market research firm, said, "We can use this in our own context for communicating with customers. It's absolutely real." A couple of executives from United Rentals wanted an installation "yesterday," but were willing to settle for getting the equipment from the show floor. "Can we take that one right now?" asked Michael Ellis.

According to the companies, the AT&T Telepresence Solution works over the AT&T Virtual Private Network transport and provides:

• AT&T-owned Cisco TelePresence equipment
• Visual experience with the simplicity of a phone call
• Installation, monitoring and management of the application
• On-site equipment maintenance and repair, plus remote support
  
• Ability to handle complex, multinational, inter-company communications
• Security and reliability, as well as reduced IT staff requirements and limited impact on existing network applications
• Reduced exposure to technological obsolescence, reduced upfront capital expenditure
  

Global companies with extended supply chains can use telepresence to improve communications and accelerate time-to-market. They can also apply the visual medium to transcend cross-cultural communication hurdles, and thereby improve the speed of decision-making and overall operational efficiency.

Managed Service Enables Secure Delivery of Intellectual Property

In a global economy, professional services firms must differentiate themselves from their competition in increasingly creative ways. Rockwell Technology Group, a Grand Rapids, Mich.-based software development firm, serves customers across the U.S. Midwest and Canada, including manufacturers, insurance companies, and management services.

Because its customers are widespread, it needed to come up with a way to quickly and securely deliver software updates and patches for systems it had developed. As a way to save both time and money, it uses WebEx Workspace, a hosted extranet service, to post the results of its work for download by customers.

The alternative would be to burn the software onto a CD or DVD and either have it delivered by hand or shipped overnight. But by using WebEx Workspace, Rockwell garners several advantages.

Saving Time, Increasing Security
One advantage is that the software updates, which may be necessary to make a business process more efficient, are immediately available to customers. "As soon as our developers have new custom software ready for delivery, I can call the customer and say, 'download it and you're good to go," says Mark Laws, Rockwell Technology Group's chief operating officer. Rockwell doesn't have to send someone to the customer to install the software.

Rockwell's customers also appreciate the increased security. WebEx Workspace uses the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol to ensure protection during transmission, and Rockwell posts software updates in a password-protected folder accessible only to that customer.

Hosted Collaboration Brings Internal Advantages
Rockwell also uses the collaborative workspace internally as well, which helps the company update team members about customer projects.

It stores project-related documents in the hosted Document Manager; it uses the Discussion Forums to carry on impromptu online chats, which are then maintained for later access by other team members; and it maintains schedules and to-do lists using other Workspace capabilities.

Even though Rockwell could just as easily deploy collaborative software internally, it prefers to use WebEx Workspace because of its capacity and convenience. "We have millions of gigabytes stored on the WebEx Workspace," says Laws. "If one of our computers crashes, we don't have to worry about losing any data. We just go to another computer."

If you need to share sensitive information securely, and don’t want to worry about maintaining an extensive infrastructure, asking a managed services provider to set up a collaborative workspace can help you focus on serving your customers more productively.

Videoconferencing Enables Sales For Global Consulting Firm

The business case made the argument for Kline & Company, a management consulting and research firm about to celebrate its 50th anniversary, to investigate hosted videoconferencing. A global company, it handles approximately 40 projects at any given time. Three to six people collaborate on each project, which last three months on average. About three-quarters of its projects are global.

To collaborate and share knowledge, team members confer approximately 20 times over the duration of a project. That's thousands of in-person meetings over the course of a year, between colleagues and clients who are unlikely to be in the same location. The cost -- both financially and in terms of time -- was becoming prohibitive.

Serving Client Needs
Companies benefit from management consulting firms' insight because of their aggregated experience. But that insight needs to be shared because not every consultant can join every engagement. That's why John Hadley, Kline’s director of IT, is so bullish on WebEx's hosted videoconferencing service.

He investigated other services before settling on WebEx, impressed by its platform independence; other solutions required software to be installed on their (and clients') computers, which can be problematic in these security-conscious days.

WebEx Meeting Center, launched from a Kline-branded portal and integrated with Microsoft Outlook, provided a fully integrated Web collaboration solution that offered easy set-up of meetings and a virtual meeting experience, "as if we were all sitting in one room," Hadley says.

The improvement WebEx brought to collaboration on client engagements was so clear that Kline began deploying it elsewhere within the company. Its market research group began using it for pre- and post-sales activities, hosting 30-minute WebEx seminars for each study it produces. This lets the company reach up to 50 prospects at a time and help generate sales leads for its consulting group.

Improving Sales and Collaboration
Kline also started using WebEx internally for communication. It's used for quarterly staff meetings and sales meetings, among others.

Because of its global reach, the company also uses WebEx for sales presentations. This helps when clients are geographically dispersed as well, because the team can make presentations to up to 12 people at the same time.

When the research team launched a new database capability, using WebEx for demos helped reduce the sales cycle: the company converted 100% of its prospects to sales within 30 days.

With all companies running leaner these days, it's impossible for key personnel to cover the ground they did in the past. Think about how videoconferencing can speed up not only collaboration and information sharing in your company, but also help reduce your sales cycle.

Five Ways to Avoid Business Travel Expenses In 2009

Novell has canceled BrainShare. Apple is ending appearances at MacWorld. And thousands of businesses continue to cut their travel budgets for 2009.

I've got some unconventional advice for you: Stay on the road in 2009, and make sure you're meeting face-to-face with your best business prospects and sales leads. I plan to be on the road at least 40 to 50 percent of the time in 2009.

But on the other hand, our business continues to embrace a range of online technologies that drive conversation and collaboration with employees, customers and partners. Here are five options that can enable your business to save money and cut travel costs in 2009.

1. Hosted TelePresence: Yes, TelePresence (next-generation video conferencing) is a great way to drive communications. But building out TelePresence studios (they resemble executive boardrooms for the digital age) can cost $300,000 or more. Lower-end TelePresence solutions can cost about $12,000 and prices continue to fall.

Still, you can avoid the capital costs entirely by embracing hosted TelePresence. Much in the way that some on-premise applications are shifting into the cloud and SaaS (software as a service) model, TelePresence is gaining momentum in a hosted or pay-per-use model.

Take a look at AT&T's work with Cisco Systems, as well as Cisco's efforts to develop Public Rooms TelePresence. Over time, you will see more and more hotels, airports and public gathering places offering TelePresence rooms that you rent by the hour. And increasingly, the back-end services will involve hosted VoIP mixed with TelePresence.

2. Skype: An oldie but a goodie. Although eBay hasn't managed to monitize or fully profit from its Skype acquisition, the Skype platform continues to deliver big cost savings to my own business.

During a recent trip to Australia, I used Skype to make free VoIP calls to friends, family and my business partner in New England. The call quality made it sound as if all participants were down the hall from one another.

However, here's the challenge: To make free skype calls with your fellow employees, your peers also need have Skype accounts. Otherwise, you need to pay to "dial" from Skype to employees' traditional phones. At our business, Skype is a mandatory, cost-saving tool. And we find we communicate with many of our clients in Europe, India and Australia using the Skype platform.

3.WebEx: In February 2007 I visited Cisco Systems for an IT channel briefing. When we got on the subject of Unified Communications, I told Cisco they needed a stronger applications story to help show the power of Unified Communications. "You need an application like WebEx," were my exact words.

Two weeks later -- and by pure coincidence -- Cisco acquired WebEx. Clearly, I believed in WebEx for online meetings and Web conferences even before Cisco opened its wallet.

4. FreeConference.com: A great way to organize free conference calls with internal users or external sources. Many businesses spend thousands of dollars on conference bridges and other group-oriented phone conferences. But Free Conferences pushes the cost out to each dialer. And that cost is typically covered by each dialer's existing long-distance plan.

5. Be A Guest: Before you register for an event, conference or trade show, check in with the conference host to see if they need guest speakers for panels and breakout sessions. Then, see if those event hosts will pick up some -- or all -- of your travel costs.

If you're a dynanic speaker with unique views to share, some conference hosts will tap their own travel budgets to cover your trip expenses. But, pick your spots wisely. Plenty of conferences aren't worth your time, and many conferences will face light attendence in 2009.

How Web-Based Training Delivers Business Impact

There's a touchy little secret about call centers: their employee turnover is atrocious; it can reach as high as 26 percent per year, according to one expert's estimates. As a result, companies strive to ease the stress of their customer service agents.

Continental Airlines, the fourth largest airline in the U.S. with $14 billion in revenues, realized that by deploying VoIP technology with personal computers, it could route reservations calls to agents' homes. This not only reduced the need for call center real estate, but it also gives reservations agents the ability to both telecommute and time-shift their work. Today, almost 1,100 agents work at home.

Turning To Videoconferencing Technology
Unfortunately, even good ideas sometimes have bad side effects. Continental found that they could easily keep employees up-to-date on staff issues with regular teleconferences. But for training and evaluations -- activities that required visual interaction -- agents still had to get into their cars and drive to a call center location.

Continental solved the problem by turning to technology a second time, implementing the WebEx hosted system for improving communications with its remote employees. By using hosted WebEx Meeting Center sessions, supervisors can easily update small groups of employees on policy or process changes. They can also schedule one-on-one training sessions.

"Using WebEx, supervisors share their desktops to show agents how to use a specific feature on our reservation program," says Leslie Colbert, Continental's director of training and communication. "WebEx gives all of our agents direct and frequent contact with management."

Saving Time and Fuel
Continental estimates that it's saving more than 10 million miles of car travel, 9 million pounds of emissions, and about 500,000 gallons of fuel annually. The airline is also implementing WebEx eLearning for new hires.

Overall, it's benefiting both internally and externally. "WebEx helped us create an incredible remote worker program which aids us in our recruiting practices," says Colbert. "Our telecommuting program is now a huge draw for potential hires."

That's a double advantage for Continental. At the same time it's increasing employee satisfaction, it's also gaining a better reputation for being environmentally sensitive.

If you haven't already embraced Web collaboration tools in your organization, consider it as an appropriate New Years resolution to boost your team's productivity.

Closing the Business Video Communication Gap

According to Matt Cowall at Appia Communications, if you look around the business video communication landscape today, you'll see two extremes in predominant use within the marketplace.

At one end are TelePresence and other highly sophisticated solutions. These are expensive and largely aimed at the enterprise market, but the quality of the video experience is excellent.

At the other end are PC- and Web-based solutions. These products are inexpensive, but often lack the quality and reliability that business users require.

Mid-Market Video Requirements
Somewhere in the middle, SMBs and similar organizations hope for the best of both extremes -- high video quality and reliability at an affordable price.

But a recent convergence of circumstances and next-generation technologies appears to be closing the gap in both directions, fueled by:

• The soaring costs, hassles, and inefficiencies associated with travel
• The slowing of the economy, which puts a premium on doing more with less
• The focus on reducing carbon emissions
• Internet Protocol (IP) technology, which cuts video transport costs, especially in comparison with traditional ISDN services
• New video compression codecs
• The emergence of Video as a Service (VaaS)

The Rise in Virtual Meetings

Case in point: in survey results released last month by the National Business Travel Association, travel buyers from over 320 U.S. companies reported a 57 percent increase in the use of videoconferencing, and 81 percent of those respondents said that the increase is due to a deliberate replacement of travel with video.

Video communication is on the rise, but how will "the middle" fully adopt and employ it? What mix of products and services will meet the demand? It will be fascinating to find out. Maybe next time, we can discuss it face to face.