CTO Blog
There is little doubt that the credit crunch has brought about a fault line in the business continuum by creating extreme circumstances that have sped up interest in innovation through technology to put business growth back on the table. In some ways the previously little-known volcano in Iceland and the resulting impact on air travel has also been a catalyst for change in business behaviour with respect to how we interact. Add pressure on budgets to the mix and the scene was clearly set for a boost in video conferencing, or its high grade option, telepresence.
However, that’s only part of the story about how video is being used, however before I leave this part of the topic behind there are a couple of points to make. The first is that I really would have loved to steal the headline from a posting on the growth of video for conferencing with the byline; ‘Eruption in Video Conferencing continues as new Volcano ash alert’. How is that for a topical attention grabbing headline!?
The more serious point is that those planning enterprise-level investments in video conferencing should have one eye on the issue of standards which is just beginning to emerge. Sure the business case may be in-house around linking key enterprise complexes at the beginning but it’s going to look a pretty poor investment pretty quickly if the expense corporate installation can’t be used with key external customers and suppliers. The industry as ever has made it really complicated with terminology and different standards, but you can download a great pdf document that provides an excellent overview to anyone wanting to understand what’s what.
My real interest is in all of this is the growth in low-cost messaging using video by every day employees. There are at least three common tools now around; many new notebooks, such as the one I am using have a built in camera and capability; most smartphones can accommodate small clips; and there are low cost webcams to clip onto PCs. Actually I am using a fourth tool that I really rate and have been surprised to see how many others are in use; the Flip. The simplest device to carry and use, but with two hours of high grade recording time and direct USB plug-in to download and charge without needing any cables. Flip also has a web sharing site to exchange, download, etc. This device truly does make it so easy that you find yourself recording more and more video notes to your colleagues.
As an example of why and how this is growing; in my private life I had a problem with a mechanical device, and the immediate advice from this company’s service support line was, ‘Got a phone with video? Can you take a video and post it’. And sure enough they were able to come back with the assembly replacement solution, and guess what, there was also a video to show how it should be done! Now I was pretty interested in this and pursued it with the service manager who admitted that originally it was an employee who started asking customers for video clips from phones unofficially via video sharing web sites, but that they had now adopted it as a standard procedure. Enterprise-wide I asked? No just a local country and department innovation.
So once again there is innovation in the use of technology at the edge of the business to improve customer service, a common theme today, but no path upward to leverage this. It’s definitely a case of people adopting what they see as familiar consumer technology to use at work, in a hands-on sense of what the issues and solutions are, rather than a top down big change driven corporately that is succeeding in many cases. So what’s the issue? Answer is it’s just the same as social networking; it’s happening all over every enterprise without, management knowledge and is pretty well always based on being hosted on an external site. Short video clips and social networks go hand in hand, but video downloads are more complex in terms of implications on bandwidth etc.
What really made me sit up and blink was to hear that this service centre had solved the firewall problem to allow them to be free to use video in this way. Their answer? They had an extra phone line installed that wasn’t on the records and were using it for broadband access. Think about it! It’s a pretty easy trick!!
Am I against video because of this? Certainly not, but I do think it’s the next round of pressure for change, and just as with social networking it wont go away if IT and management ignores the topic. Instead both need a new approach to safe enablement. You have been warned! And to finish off two looks at other ways instant videos are being used; Business story telling with video – increasing use to show customers and using an instant video submitter for business survival.
About the author
Capgemini Global Chief Technology Officer, Andy is a member of the Capgemini Group management board and advises on all aspects of technology-driven market changes, together with being a member of the Policy Board for the British Computer Society. Andy is the author of many white papers, and the co-author three books that have charted the current changes in technology and its use by business starting in 2006 with ‘Mashup Corporations’ detailing how enterprises could make use of Web 2.0 to develop new go to market propositions. This was followed in May 2008 by Mesh Collaboration focussing on the impact of Web 2.0 on the enterprise front office and its working techniques, then in 2010 “Enterprise Cloud Computing: A Strategy Guide for Business and Technology leaders” co-authored with well-known academic Peter Fingar and one of the leading authorities on business process, John Pyke. The book describes the wider business implications of Cloud Computing with the promise of on-demand business innovation. It looks at how businesses trade differently on the web using mash-ups but also the challenges in managing more frequent change through social tools, and what happens when cloud comes into play in fully fledged operations. Andy was voted one of the top 25 most influential CTOs in the world in 2009 by InfoWorld and is grateful to readers of Computing Weekly who voted the Capgemini CTOblog the best Blog for Business Managers and CIOs each year for the last three years.
Interesting how the end users will circumvent technology and policies to ensure their jobs are more effective and efficient. I understand my peers in the project development environments will even use their own smartphones to hold instant chat messages or communicate via some collaborative social networking tool to make their jobs easier when policies restrict traffic on the corporate network.
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When will broadband bandwidths start to be large enough to cope with corporate traffic to include high speed video conferencing on a daily scale? To improve economies of scale then I suspect the government has to help the ISPs speed up the investment into a national fibre optic network for all to use.
The future is bright…but is the end of the tunnel still too far away to hold off investments into high volume bandwidth traffic? Then again, is this going to end up like our British motorways – the more lanes provided easing congestion, the more the lanes fill with ‘new’ traffic? How much CPU time is wasted by all those “behind the scenes” tasks we did so well without when we only had a 256MB/1GHz Athlon processor/Windows 95
first apologies over the delay in this reply but it seems from emails sent direct to me that we have had a problem over commenting. I hope its sorted now!
so in reply to Jordan; it would seem that a combination of competition at company and personal level inevitably drives the seeking out of ways to gain an advantage. The result is as you describe, and I see little hope of going back! commercial opportunity usually spots the bottlenecks as opportunities to move into the ‘gaps’ so I put more hope into this than government intervention!
on the other hand some things drop of the table all the time and remove demand, i.e. long time since I have seen a fax, yet that was the backbone of commerce in the eighties. However on the can we go back to simplicity, the story that really makes the point for me was one I was told about the introduction of phones on all desktops with direct dial. many older senior managers were convinced the result would be chaos and time wasting! seems little changes as the same argument went on for email and now social networks.