Need to start reducing travel and slashing operational costs? Got a Green IT strategy but need some further business case info? Wanting to build a UC business case?
This month we have published a great case study on how Microsoft Australia ran a trial on changing the delivery model of our monthly manager meeting, which 130 people attend from across Australia. Instead of having all those people travel to the meeting, Microsoft utilised Roundtable devices in meeting rooms across Australia. It is quite a good overview on how the meeting was approached, how they setup the room, some recommended best practices on how to handle the human aspects of future meetings and what the dollar and environmental benefits were. The three graphs below from the paper show the estimated productivity, Co2 & travel dollar savings:
Estimated Productivity Savings
These savings were based on 160 staff-hours being saved through a reduction in travel.
Estimated Carbon Savings
Estimated T&E Savings
The travel and entertainment savings above show an estimated $18k saving in cold hard cash across Australia.
In this calculation, what isn't considered are the soft costs - always a hard one to quantify! But just to get the ball rolling, one of these soft benefits is the time given back to staff as a result of not having to travel i.e. facilitating a work-life balance: for example: think about how much more time these staff get to spend with their families by not staying overnight in hotels.
Check out the full paper here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd126738.aspx
The sociology of UC
One of the interesting aspects of this mini-study, was the fact that they organised (for the first meeting) to have an IT specialist and a training co-coordinator on hand to ensure the setup was correct and any issues could be resolved ASAP.
One of our UC specialists here in Australia, Sandra, is a big supporter of the sociology aspects of UC. Whenever we visit customers together there are a couple of recurring themes we discuss with customers. One of those is when you are planning a UC deployment, realise that realistically not all meetings will or can be changed to video conferences. If you are starting out with Live Meeting and Roundtable, Sandra suggests selecting:
- "A Group of people that need to work together (always the best as it is about mapping to not just the way a team meets but the way they do 1:1 discussions and leverage resources whilst in front of a customer or citizen to resolve issues with colleagues in and out of your organisation) OR
- A particular team meeting (weekly team or project update meeting) OR
- An Event (perhaps someone has to fly in for a conference to do a presentation)
- ...OR a combination of all"
Below are the example business process and metrics Sandra uses when developing PoCs for customers around UC:
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Business Process |
Process Description |
Sample Metrics |
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Access to Experts |
End Users need solutions or answers and often the solution requires expertise or contextual knowledge which has to be made available at the point of need. The expertise may often not be available locally but the information needs to be readily available. |
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Remote Meeting And Collaboration |
Conducting meetings with team members working out of another location or from home. |
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Staff Learning and Development |
Staff training in outlying areas is expensive and logistically difficult. Sending managers and trainers out to remote branches or getting remote staff together at a central facility for training is challenging and expensive. |
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Flexible Workforce - Access to Mail and Enterprise VOIP |
Anywhere access to Mail and Communications through better access to key infrastructure remotely. |
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IT Project: Exchange Consolidation with Unified Messaging |
An organisations email system today is still fundamental to the way many people communicate. A system that is faster, more reliable and cheaper to run is still core to the Unified Communications strategy. |
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For more detailed UC blogging, also check out: Johann Kruse, Aussie UC Guru: http://blogs.technet.com/jkruse
And if you are interested in User Groups in Oz, check out:
Melbourne UCG: http://melbuc.org
Sydney UCG: http://sydneyuc.org
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