Week 7 - Phoning it in, in 2014

As anyone that has worked in a business environment knows, one of the most dreaded aspects is the "never-ending meeting." That is not to say that all meetings are bad, but they have a tendency to either drag on too long or degenerate into a chaotic mess of blame and complain. Add to that the fact that time spent in a meeting is time that could be spent actually doing something, and a lot of people dread and resent them. Enter the teleconference. For years the business professional on the go has had the option of the conference call. They would dial into the meeting and participate via phone (now cell phone) and they could be anywhere. Over the years this has evolved to cell phones and a large push was made to start incorporating video.
Today, what was once a grainy and static filled mess with bad audio, has become a mobile HD experience used by some of the biggest companies in the world (Collett, 2014). Advances in technology have put videoconferencing in the palm of our hands via smartphones and laptops are almost guaranteed to have a built in web camera. This allows global communication such that it doesn't matter where a person is they can participate in important meetings.
It also has opened up a new market for speakers and experts to be hired for events at a largely discounted cost. There are a growing number of authors, experts, speakers, and consultants that are willing to Skype or Face Time into a meeting for little or nothing. With no travel costs and minimal time consumption many companies are turning to this as an option and websites, such as Zintro, are gathering these experts under one site. This has spread to classrooms, community groups, we even have looked at inviting a children's author to Skype in at the library for a Q&A session.
The point is, with the capability of telepresence on a global scale there is no end to how much more interesting and productive those boring old meeting can become. Fore example, my brother, a mid-high level executive at a prominent worldwide bank, recently had a teleconference that consisted of around 25 people where only 10 of those individuals were in the same board room. The rest were scattered around the globe and this was business as usual.


Pradhan, Nitin. (2014, January 23). Better Videoconferencing in the Cloud. InformationWeek.  Retrieved from http://www.informationweek.com/government/cloud-computing/better-videoconferencing-in-the-cloud/d/d-id/1113504

Collett, Stacy. (2014, January 20). Facebook CIO Supports Video Calls to Preserve Employee Culture. CIO. Retrieved from http://www.cio.com/article/746946/Facebook_CIO_Supports_Video_Calls_to_Preserve_Employee_Culture#undefined