A budding franchise business customer (Bud) recently called me in frustration and told me, although he loved Skype, he could no longer use it in his business.  Why?  In a one hour conference call, he would spend half his time managing the technology in the call.  The cost of using this popular conferencing technology was a lot more than nothing.  Not only did he spend half his meeting time managing the technology but he lost his focus and his credibility with the other meeting participants – his franchisees.

Bud didn’t have a lot of money to invest in an extravagant room system but he needed a better collaborative experience because he was building his franchise business up and needed to hold regular meetings and more importantly, training sessions with his franchisees who were spread out over a large geographical area.  Traveling in to a central location was not a practical solution. The franchisees could not justify the time out of the field, nor the investment in travel.

He thought that he needed to upgrade to a higher end video system which could handle multiple locations all tied into a stable, single video call. Although this type of solution would certainly enrich the collaborative experience for all the participants, a room based video system for all the franchisees was out of his budget and would not deliver as rich an experience as was available at a much lower price tag.

I suggested a three pronged approach.

First, he needed to enrich the audio experience because audio is “table stakes” for any type of collaboration or conferencing experience. If you don’t have audio, you don’t have a conference, no matter how rich the other conferencing technologies are. I recommended a new Polycom star phone for approximately $500 which is capable of analog or IP telephony. This investment will serve him today (analog) and tomorrow, when he switches to IP.

“Now when we talk, we don’t have to time when we talk because the Polycom system handles the voices coming from both sides of conversation without cutting off pieces of the conversation. It is a much more natural audio experience.”

He was thrilled with his investment because the richness of the sound quality of his conferences went way up. And it was little things that made a big difference.

Second, I told him that he should invest in an interactive whiteboard from SMART technologies. The SMART board provides the richest collaborative experience available. When people discover what they can do with this tool they are amazed.  And a power user looks like a magician on the board when they are conducting a meeting with it.

During a meeting you can use any application that runs on a PC, annotate and capture the image of the annotations on the application as a whiteboard (or flip chart) page. Websites, PowerPoint, Excel, Visio, PDF, etc. At the end of the meeting, everyone gets an email of the PDF of the pages of the meeting notes – instantly!  And the board can be cleared up and ready for the next meeting in seconds by simply hitting the reset button.

These features alone can be worth the investment.  And take note, this capability can be used in any meeting – even if there are no remote participants.  So how did the SMART technology go over with the franchise company? They love it!  But not without going through a bit of a learning curve because he had never heard of or seen a SMART board before I recommended it.  Bud took the upfront training, but it wasn’t until he actually started using it and became comfortable with it, did he really start to appreciate his new collaborative tool and the richness it added to their meetings.

And that brings me to the final piece of the puzzle – web conferencing or sharing of the desktop. There are numerous offerings out there that are available from free to a WebEx or GoToMeeting price point of about $40-$50 dollars a month. In this case I recommended the SMART Bridgit software because it provides the features required and provides the ability to share the SMART board screens with any PC, Mac, iPad or Android tablet.  The Bridgit software is particularly good for interactive training sessions, where there are many participants collaborating.

So none of Bud’s franchisees had to go out and buy new technology.  They could use their existing personal technology to actively participate in the meetings being held at Bud’s office.  The Bridgit software provides a richer platform for many-to-many collaboration vs the one-to-many collaboration which is the strength of the GoToMeeting and WebEx software.

Bud has taken a major step forward in collaborating with his franchisees.  His meetings are now focused on doing business and not managing technology.  The experience is richer which allows him to more effectively work with his franchisees and grow their businesses together.

The three quick hitters:

1. Upgraded audio experience with a new rich and reliable Polycom SoundStation
2. A SMART board to bring the collaborative experience new and enriched capabilities. WATCH VIDEO
3. Bridgit conferencing software to allow Bud to share the SMART board with the PCs, iPads, Macs and Android tablets of his franchisees

Bud still wants to add video to the mix in the future and he has some great options open to him:

• For $100 he can add a USB camera to the SMART board and turn on the video if he wants to talk live to the franchisees (this is not an HD experience but does provide video if you only need it in small doses)
• He can use a number of video software products that range from free to under $50/mth per port (HD, adaptive bandwidth, no special network quality of service (QoS) required)
• He can go to a high end room system with a dedicated codec, camera and large screens for video (there are a range of options here as well)

Upgrading your collaborative experience does not have to be expensive and the returns can be huge.  Putting in the right tools to support and enhance how you work together with people and increase your velocity of collaboration is paramount.

May 9, 2012 (Toronto, Canada) –The Toronto Construction Association (TCA), a membership organization comprised of 2,200 local construction industry practitioners, announced today their strategic partnership to launch TCA Smart Advantage, a collaborative community for members of the TCA to work together more effectively.

TCA supports its member clients with access to networking opportunities, education and training, industry expertise and thought leadership as well as discounts to industry-related resources. ET Group provides innovative Audio Visual and IT solutions for companies seeking to build collaborative workspaces and ecosystems.  The partnership between the two companies will help to drive productivity and collaboration within the construction industry.

“The new TCA SMART Advantage initiative will make it easy for professionals to connect with other TCA members to share drawings, plans, project schedules and to modify those documents seamlessly,” said Paul Gragtmans, Principal, ET Group. “We are pleased to be bringing our SMART board expertise to TCA members as part of this very exciting project.”

The TCA SMART Advantage program provides:

• Site Survey
• Installed SMART board, SMART projector and all cables and connectors
• Training (see TCA website, TCA Smart Advantage)
• One year Service Plan (break/fix support)
• One year Bridgit Service to connect locations:
  - SMART board to SMART board
  - SMART board to PC/iPad
  - PC to PC/iPad

The promotion will be officially launched on May 9, 2012, at the Members’ Open House at the TCA head office. ET Group will be on site to demo the product, answer questions and distribute information

About TCA
The Toronto Construction Association was founded in February 1867 by a group of 58 Canadian construction industry executives. The association’s mandate in those early days was to promote the highest possible standards of professionalism in an industry characterized by stiff competition and often razor thin margins. Today, more than 145 years later, not much has changed. Our membership is bigger, of course, with more than 2,200 member companies representing something approaching 300,000 local construction industry practitioners, but our mandate is ostensibly the same

First it was about moving pictures – creating a movie.  Then sound was added and the big screen.  Colour brought a new and richer dimension. Then sound became Dolby sound.  And now special effects are taking the movie experience to progressively greater heights all the time.

What can we learn from the movie going experience that we can apply to connecting people in different locations?

• What if you could see the person you were conferencing with and they were bigger than life?
• What if you could see them on a 70″ screen with a full “shoulders up” view – like seeing Jay Leno, David Letterman or Conan O’Brien on late night TV on your big screen TV?
• What if you could share a desktop with them on another big screen?
• What if you could stand at a whiteboard while talking to them and whatever you wrote, they could see on the whiteboard in their room.  And when they wrote on their whiteboard it would show up on yours.  Both of you writing on your respective whiteboards whenever you wanted, but both sharing and contributing to the same content.
• What if you converse with them with the greatest sound quality and clarity, in true stereo surround sound? Like being there.
• What if the experience was bigger than life?  Just like the movies.

You would be able to see and hear the people you are meeting with better than you could if you were there in person.  If you could create that kind of experience, would you still need to have a face-to-face meeting with them? Maybe, if you were traveling for reasons other than the meeting itself.

You can create a conferencing and collaboration experience that is bigger than life and is better than being there!

The question is really, “How good a conferencing experience do you want to give the meeting participants”?  If you provide a rich enough experience, there is no need for face-to-face meetings.

And the technology, like special effects in the movies, continues to evolve to make the experience richer and richer.

The lesson we can take from the movies, for the real time interactive collaborative ecosystems we are building in our organizations, is that we need to provide a rich experience for the participants.  If the experience is rich, easy to use and people have easy access to it, they will want to use the technology to collaborate more effectively.  And wanting is what we should be striving for – user pull, for the experience vs pushing the technology on them.

The formula for increased collaboration is simple…

RICHNESS x (USABILITY + ACCESSIBILITY).

To learn more about the formula and how to apply it to your organization, get our FREE GUIDE HERE.

It is important to remember that we can’t ‘buy’ collaboration.  Collaboration is something that people have to want to do.

Paul Gragtmans, ET Group

Collaborative Workspaces Induce Productivity

Attraction and retention of talent has taken on new challenges since the economic downturn that irreparably changed the way companies acquire skilled resources. The flux in the job market, rise of contingent workers, outsourcing of support staff, and the generational shift ushering in technology enabled Milliennials have all spawned new workplace behaviours. The separation of work and home life is a traditionalist relic now blurred by social media, alternative work strategies and tethered expectations facilitated by smartphones and an increasingly global economy.

So how as a company do you retain good talent? The short answer is that retention is no longer the prime directive. Engagement is by and large the mandate providing flexible work strategies that align with the expectations of a fickle labour force, enticed by Google cultural complexes, fitness facility options, and generally warm and friendly environments. Of course there are other less tangible factors that come into play including commitments to sustainability, good corporate citizenship and brand profile.

With workforce trends changing employee behaviour, the evolution of the office has in many cases lagged behind as evidenced by the preponderance of empty desks. Progressive organizations have recognized the need to provide collaborative workspaces and tools to induce productivity. The lack of suitable meeting rooms and absence of appropriate work settings means employees are not engaged at the workplace and that the office does not have the ‘stickiness’ to act as the cultural work center of that organization. People need to have a sense of participation in the collective enterprise and the best place to do this is in the office.

The office is under pressure to exert itself in the face of competition. That competition can be alternative work spaces like the home office, co-working environments and companies who provide a range of work options and tools which foster collaboration and team interaction. Steelcase, a global furniture manufacturer, refers to this as palette of choice. Engagement is in part driven by the autonomy to choose the spaces, technology and tools to get work done. By providing a selection of workplace settings, meeting rooms and more lifestyle driven environments which foster cultural interaction, even those employees who have work outside options prefer the office as their go-to workplace. A recent study by Steelcase and Corenet Global showed that 86 percent of companies offer alternative work strategies yet few workers are taking advantage of the flexible approach. Nearly half the companies reported that 10% or less of their employees routinely work remotely  and more than 70% of workers still see the office as the best space to collaborate with colleagues and access tools and technology.

What is clear is that organizations that provide choice and leverage their workspace to meet the changing needs of the workforce will have a competitive advantage. Through smart design and planning, these companies can empower their employees to be more productive and reaffirm the cultural glue that sets it apart as a desirable place to work.

To help us answer this question, we turned to Ron Ricci and Carl Wiesse and their book.  The Collaborative Imperative – Executive Strategies for Unlocking Your Organization’s True Potential

They begin by identifying 3 areas of benefit;

1. Operational ROI impacts expenditures on such items as cutting travel, reducing infrastructure needs or lowering bandwidth requirements.
2. Productivity ROI are improvements in efficiencies, reduced decision making cycles or optimized matching of resources to opportunities.
3. Strategic ROI, although the hardest to measure offers the greatest potential for a business to transform itself in significant ways to create highly differentiated levels of value or giant leaps in customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Ricci and Wiesse outline significant returns for those that simply apply a basic effort of collaboration enhancement, and multiples of that for companies that put more effort forward.

You get out what you put into it.

• Basic Collaborators enjoyed a 280% Return on Investment
• Intermediate Collaborators received a 360% ROI
• Advanced Collaborators enjoyed 610% ROI.

Looking at Return on Collaboration by Industry and measuring for Average Payback in Months and Five Year ROIs they found a range of between 40 months and 120% for the Retail industry upwards to 21 months payback and a 204% 5 Year ROI for the High Tech sector. Further the study found that favorable ROIs were experienced regardless of global location and that the average payback took place within a couple of years.

When looking at companies in terms of size, they found that the larger the company the better the return. The payback in months ranged from 27 to 37 months with a 5 Year ROI range of between 99% and 173%. Companies with between 1,000 and 25,000 staff experienced the best results.

Looking within the organization as to which departments benefited the most from collaboration investments, they found that the best returns came where the largest numbers of people interact to produce value. The more interactions required to make good decisions, the greater the opportunity to benefit from increased collaboration.

The big departmental winners included;

• R&D
• Sales
• Marketing
• Investor Relations
• Public Relations.

Where companies once found high ROI in process and quality improvements, those strategies are largely well established and in place. We are now finding those high return opportunities in the realm of enhanced collaborative interactions between people.

Mayhew has been supporting clients with cutting-edge workspace solutions for three decades.  Their mission is to boost productivity, facilitate collaboration, enhance work/life balance and ultimately contribute to bottom line growth. ET Group provides innovative audiovisual and workspace solutions for companies seeking to build collaborative ecosystems.  The partnership between the two companies will integrate best practices and expertise to deliver high-quality and holistic solutions to clients.

“The collaboration between ET Group and Mayhew provides a solution designed to meet the needs of companies who want to improve collaborative efficiencies and opportunities while dealing with ever changing business conditions,” said Jim Gragtmans, Principal, ET Group. “An effective collaborative ecosystem can increase revenue, reduce costs and enhance productivity. We are excited to partner with Mayhew as our clients often seek interior design and workspace products expertise to support the audiovisual supports we provide. We are looking forward to utilizing their expertise as a compliment to our solutions.”

Today’s ever-changing workplace dynamic demands that companies implement Collaboration Ecosystems to enable their staff to work effectively and efficiently, not only within their company, but also as seamlessly with their suppliers and customers. Mayhew and ET Group integrate the design consulting and implementation resources to make this happen.

“Bringing all of the pieces together, I feel very confident that our partnership will assist clients in establishing their vision for new collaborative workspaces,” said Maurice Benatar, Vice President, Marketing and Business Development, Mayhew. “Furthermore, together, we will be able to offer a more seamless and integrated implementation of that vision.”

For more information about ET Group’s solutions, contact Jim Gragtmans

About ET GROUP

A collaborative ecosystem designed by ET Group allows organizations to connect and innovate using emerging collaborative technology in audio visual communication including ground-breaking smart board technology. The outcome for company collaboration, locally or globally, is improved competitiveness and business results. ET Group consults on the integrated collaboration technology roadmap, assembles the collaboration and innovation strategy and implements conference room design including room set up, support and equipment purchases to ensure you meet your business goals.

About Mayhew

Mayhew has 150 employees and is headquartered in Toronto, Ontario with offices in Kitchener, Windsor and Stoney Creek. Synonymous with space and interior design ingenuity, Mayhew has designed award winning spaces for Business News Network and the CTV Olympic Digital Lounge among others. With a mission to create and maintain workplaces that work, Mayhew has designed over 22 million square feet of space, successfully moved 300,000 people, and supplied and installed over 100,000 workstations. For more information or detailed case studies visit www.mayhew.ca.

“The biggest benefit for us has been relationships we’ve formed with the other dealers,” says Jim Gragtmans, owner of ET Group of Toronto, a 40-person A/V integration firm that represented USAV’s first foray outside the U.S. about two years ago.

Gragtmans is excited to see USAV starting to embrace “special interest groups” that delve into topics such as marketing, IT and other business groups that go beyond the corner office. He would love to see the group embrace more maintenance services contracts — an area where A/V lags behind IT in general, he says — and hopes to see USAV create revenue streams that go beyond volume discounts in the future.

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That is a pretty straight forward answer.  But there are many different web conferencing technologies and video conferencing technologies available in the market with different functionalities and price points.

But, as with all technology, the lines start to blur between these two technologies as other new technology is created or added to existing products.

What is blurring the lines?

• Web conferencing products are adding video
• Video conferencing products let you share content
• Both web and video capabilities are being built into other software products
• New technological capabilities stir up the pot even more

The net result is – confusion!

And, as if this wasn’t confusing enough, there is another important factor to consider.  Not only are web conferencing and video conferencing great tools to collaborate, but there are two other key conferencing technologies that also come into the mix – audio conferencing and interactive whiteboard conferencing.

So how do you sort out what is best for what you need?

You need to figure out where you are starting from and where you want to get to.  Your starting point is determining: which of the conferencing technologies you have today; who in your organization can use them; and how easy they are to use.  Download our Free Guide for more on this. Your destination is your vision of how you want to be able to collaborate both within and outside of your organization.

Once you know your beginning and end points, you can figure out how to build a plan to get you where you want to go by asking yourself the right questions. Having clear answers to these questions can help you make a better determination of what makes sense for your organization.

Here are the most important questions to answer:

1. Do you want to conference with people within your organization, outside your organization, or both?
   • You should further define what types of conferencing options (audio, web, video, interactive whiteboard) you would like with each audience.

2. What conferencing technology, or technologies, will give you the biggest bang for the buck?
   • This will partly depend on what the use case is for the conferencing capability, but be careful not to only evaluate based on what you would like to do.  Many companies don’t understand what is possible to accomplish with the tools, so they may miss the greatest benefits the tools can provide.

3. Why do you want to conference? To save money? To increase productivity?  Or, to foster greater creativity and innovation in your organization?
   • The right conferencing tools can provide all three benefits, but the greatest ROI is found in stimulating innovation.  if you are just starting out, take a few steps at a time.

4. How much budget do you have to increase collaboration in your organization?
   • This will play an important role in determining which conferencing capabilities to embark on first, how widely they will be made available in your organization and when they should be deployed.
5. How rich do you want the collaboration experience to be for the participants?
   • The richness can vary for each type of conferencing capability and the richness of the experiences plays a very important role in trying to realize the ROI, e.g. if the video experience is poor, people will still travel for face-to-face meetings.

6. How important is security for your organization?
   • The spectrum is pretty wide here.  Skype has millions of users around the world because it is free, easy to use and it works pretty well for person to person communication.  But it isn’t a secure corporate platform.  On the other side of the spectrum we have locked down corporate networks, with all communication within the corporate WAN and no access in for the outside world.  Security requirements will play a very important role in determining which tools you can use and how they are deployed.

7. Do you have executive or ownership buy in to move forward with the conferencing technologies?
   • Executive sponsorship is critical.  The early adopters may latch onto the new technology but if the general population doesn’t see the executive buy in they won’t change their habits either.

8. How will the technology in group work spaces interact with the personal technology workers use at their desks, from their homes or on the road?
   • Where, when and how we work is evolving all the time.  Make sure the conferencing tools that you choose are integrated to work both in a group space and individual work environments so the two can connect seamlessly.

9. How will you manage the conferencing technologies once they are implemented?
   • Having the answers to this question is a big part of the overall decision to move forward

There is a lot more to answering these questions and each one of them will be a future blog topic with a lot more detail.

Stay tuned!

1. The Physical aspect of collaboration, meaning the surroundings in which we find ourselves to collaborate.

2. The Virtual aspect of collaboration, meaning the tools we use to communicate.

These two components are a way for us to talk, share and interact with each other, which makes use of a variety of technologies.

A more traditional interpretation of collaboration includes web conferencing – screen sharing, audio conferencing and video conferencing and not necessarily Unified Communications.

Roughly 25% of small businesses will have a social media presence in upcoming years. As businesses look for new ways to remain competitive online, a social media strategy will become a more attractive option for businesses of all sizes.

A new breed of collaborative tools embraces traditional and new ways to participate in collective thoughts, ideas and project/people development. CISCO and IBM for example both feel that social networking in the business is a significant way to collaborate – think of it as Facebook for your business, a place to share thoughts and ideas, share files (images, videos etc.) to find people in your organization, to save a profile about yourself and others, to message board or chat. CISCO Quad and IBM Connections both offer these sorts of features, as well as others such as SpeechBobble.

The good thing about social media is that it’s possible for businesses of all sizes to do something – even if it’s small.  From company blogs to collaboration in online communities, there are lots of ways for businesses to make this leap.

Project Sharing

1. Another separate yet relevant web collaboration approach is more directly related to projects and sharing the goals and objectives online in a community, Microsoft Team Foundation Server is an example of this type of tool, with deep integration with IT software project development it caters to a slightly different collaborative mode of working, yet has social network features built in
2. Basecamp (http://basecamphq.com) is another example of an ‘online project collaboration tool’, with a very large user community it is focused on the project approach to collaboration.
3. It also has many of the social networking tool features that are found in the products from IBM, CISCO and others mentioned above, such as message boards, ideas forums, file sharing and more.

So when we talk of collaboration, it is important to distinguish if the tools and technologies are live (or real time) or passive (non-real time). Most of the tools above would be considered as passive tools, and don’t require all parties to be on a call together, communicating with each other at the same time.  ET Group has focused our attention on the active collaboration tools allow conferencing via interactive whiteboards, the web, video and audio.  These are all considered real time collaboration technologies and are part of every company’s collaborative ecosystem.

Most companies have an informal collaborative ecosystem.  But more and more this needs to be formalized and managed to capture the benefits that collaboration has to offer.

If you are looking for a guide to help you with your Collaboration Ecosystem, don’t forget to download the FREE ET Group Guide.

Paul Gragtmans from ET Group along with others go through and answer some great questions on the evolution of Collaboration Solutions.

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Video Conference