Be clear about your business case
At the present time, with so much potential for disruption to travel plans, making a business case for online meetings is rather like arguing the ROI of emergency evacuation procedures. Who knows where and when fire will break out; no-one expects it. However Business Continuity Management is not the only game in town.
Meetings are expensive. Gartner suggests they might represent one of the largest costs to enterprise, second only to labour.
Online meetings cost less. IBM estimates that an in-person meeting costs about US$600 per hour whereas a Web conference is about US$6 per hour. This insight helps them to save over US$4 million in travel expenses per month using Instant Messaging and Web Conferencing.
So even if some emergency has not prevented a face-to-face meeting, there are valuable benefits from meeting online:
- You don’t need to book and set up a venue, and so you save the cost of:
- a venue (even in-house meeting rooms cost money to provide);
- power (lighting, heating, powering equipment);
- equipment (video camera, sound-recorder, TV, video player, LCD Projector);
- consumables (Whiteboard, markers, stationery);
- meals and refreshments.
- You do not have to bring remote people to a venue, so you save the cost of:
- travel;
- board and lodging.
You also recover opportunity costs such as loss of productivity due to absence and time spent in travelling. A person can take part in a single day in meetings that might have needed to be in different locations. Online meetings tend to be shorter and more focused since they do not include the same degree of socialising.
Of course online meetings are not cost-free, but many of the costs, such as connection to The Internet, depreciation of computers, electricity and phone are already included in “business as usual”. Licences to use web-conferencing, VoIP or Instant Messaging software vary from nil to perhaps £5 per seat per month in a large enterprise.
Compared with face-to-face, online meetings often add extra value:
- Automatic tracking of time and levels of participation
- You can go online “at the drop of a hat”
- You use records of meetings store and share ideas and decisions and how they were reached
- Most conferencing tools are adaptable for very large or very small group meetings
Very few wish to be an early adopter, so it may be reassuring to review some of the headlines emerging from research in 2009:
- Planners intend to make greater use of alternative meeting methods in the months ahead, including Webinars (54 percent), teleconferencing (48 percent), and videoconferencing (30 percent)”.
- A survey of nearly 1000 people in the UK showed 70% of corporate organisers and 64% of intermediary agencies predict a growth in virtual conferences and a reduction in live events in the coming year.
- 56% of corporate buyers and 59% of intermediary agencies forecast fewer live events.
- Only 7% of corporates predicted an increase in live events in 2010.
- ABM and Forrester (April 2009): “75% of business decision-makers attended three or more Web-based events during the past 12 months”.
And finally (travel agents look away now):
- February 2009 Gartner – high-definition based video meetings to replace 2.1 million airline seats annually by 2012, saving US$3.5 billion in travel and hospitality.
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