videoconferencing

  • Telepresence Enhancing Travel?

    Videoconferencing and telepresence vendors have traditionally marketed their products as a replacement for travel. This is shortsighted in that real value creation comes from integrating real-time video into business processes. Using telepresence so that people can come together spontaneously and design an airplane or develop animation or create a 24-hour healthcare delivery service produces far greater value than travel savings.

     

    Considering the obsession with marketing real-time video as a travel replacement, you might think hotels would be lukewarm about videoconferencing and telepresence. But there was nothing tepid about Mary Casey and Bob Hermany’s view of Cisco TelePresence as they announced on Tuesday Starwood’s roll out of public TelePresence rooms. The first two Starwood properties to offer TelePresence are the Sheraton on the Park in Sydney, Australia and the W Chicago. You can view the announcement video here. Incidentally, Mary is Starwood’s vice president of global corporate sales and Bob is Starwood’s senior vice president of operations.

     

    Starwood will also install Cisco TelePresence at the Sheraton New York Hotel & Towers, the Westin Los Angeles Airport and the Sheraton Centre Toronto during 2010. Later, the hotel chain will adopt TelePresence at properties in San Francisco, Dallas, Brussels and Frankfurt, among others. In my October 15, 2008 post, I wrote that Cisco and its partner, Tata Communications, were introducing public TelePresence rooms and that the first hotel chain to participate was the Taj Hotels.

     

    During a TelePresence call linking several global locations, Sean Hunt, a Starwood executive who manages the Sheraton on the Park in Sydney positioned Australia’s first public TelePresence room as both a travel benefit and alternative. “The problem is we’re isolated from the rest of the world, so this is a great alternative to long-haul travel.” The point is that rather than replace travel, TelePresence lets somebody outside Australia who may never have taken the flight get face-to-face with colleagues and partners.

    Aside from marketing and public relations advantages, there are potentially tangible benefits for hotels that adopt TelePresence. Besides renting rooms at rates that can approach $500 a day, hotels can charge $500 an hour for TelePresence. That’s the rate at the Sheraton on the Park in Sydney. Australian dollars, of course.

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  • Cisco’s John Chambers: the Hardest Part is the Culture

    I was watching Cisco CEO John Chambers do his trademark walk-and-talk style keynote yesterday at the Hilton San Francisco Union Square as Cisco was kicking off its Collaboration Summit when suddenly John interrupted his pitch for collaboration.

     

    “Do you know what the hardest change is in this?” he queried the audience rhetorically. “As any CEO will tell you, it’s the culture.”

     

    John’s observation resonated with me in that the fundamental premise of The Culture of Collaboration book is that “without a culture of collaboration, the best processes, systems, tools and leadership strategies fall flat.” In the book, I also note that “the overwhelming reason why collaboration eludes organizations involves culture.”

     

    Understanding the role of culture in creating a collaborative enterprise is paramount, particularly as Cisco introduces 61 collaboration products. Collaboration tools are key enablers, but they are far more effective in enabling collaboration in enterprises with collaborative cultures and processes.  Cisco has been focusing on collaboration more than any other initiative as an organizational imperitive and in product efforts. Now the company is fixated on persuading customers that it has reached a milestone in innovating collaboration. With that in mind, Cisco vice president of enterprise solutions Alan Cohen, a history buff and blogger, noted that Cisco was announcing its slew of products on the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall’s fall and observed that it was one of the “biggest transitions in our history.”

     

    As Tony Bates, Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Enterprise Group, highlighted Cisco’s major product introductions, he emphasized the increasing role of video in collaboration—from Flip Video camcorders to WebEx web conferencing to telepresence—and the interactivity of these tools. You can read details of the product announcements here.

     

    At a cocktail party following the keynotes, Tony and I had an engaging conversation about how the role of video has evolved. I mentioned that when I was researching my first book, Personal Videoconferencing, in the mid-1990’s, there was considerable push back against real-time video as a viable business tool. People were scared of the camera, and there was a pervasive view that one needed to have highly-honed presentation skills to use videoconferencing. Tony observed that people are increasingly accepting that the way they conduct themselves in meetings and in one-on-one workplace interactions is good enough for many video interactions.

     

    Currently, most telepresence and web conferencing interactions are scheduled. As organizational cultures evolve to support more real-time collaboration, video interaction will become more spontaneous. Then real-time video will transcend communications and become part-and-parcel of collaboration. 

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