© Kandasamy M | Dreamstime.com

MUDGE’S Musings

Events, and / or in today’s case, a general malaise, continue to conspire, sapping all the vigor out of my keyboard, but hey, recycling is IN, right? We’re all about doing the right thing here at Left-Handed Complement, and in that spirit we’re recycling some of yr (justifiably) humble svt‘s favorite electrons.

I hereby stop apologizing for observing the prime directive of blogging: Thou Shalt Blog Daily!

And, I’m guessing that most of you weren’t here nine months ago. As one of my favorite paper publications used to say as they flogged unsold back issues: “If you haven’t read it yet, it’s new for you!”

Blast from the Past!

A post we really, really loved to write, and read, and re-read…

From last fall, and always in season, especially since it’s back to school time for millions, originally posted October 31, 2007, and titled “mm181: Virtual classroom — real learning?”

MUDGE’S Musings

Apparently it’s Education Week here at L-HC! Earlier we looked at the number of engineers we’re training in the U.S.; devoted the last third of a Short Attention Span pastiche to OLPC (One Laptop Per Child); and presented a devastating counter to the engineering story with one high school teacher’s indictment of today’s students (ratified by hundreds of comments).

Featured today is a most interesting look at on-line learning at the college level.

October 31, 2007 | On Education

By JOSEPH BERGER | HERSHEY, Pa.

The university classroom of the future is in Janet Duck’s dining room on East Chocolate Avenue here.

There is no blackboard and no lectern, and, most glaringly, no students. Dr. Duck teaches her classes in Pennsylvania State University’s master’s program in business administration by sitting for several hours each day in jeans and shag-lined slippers at her dining table, which in soccer mom fashion is cluttered with crayon sketches by her 6-year-old Elijah and shoulder pads for her 9-year-old Olivia’s Halloween costume.

In this homespun setting, the spirited Dr. Duck pecks at a Toshiba laptop and posts lesson content, readings and questions for her two courses on “managing human resources” that touch on topics like performance evaluations and recruitment. The instructional software allows her 54 students to log on from almost anywhere at any time and post remarkably extended responses, the equivalent of a blog about the course. Recently, the class exchanged hard-earned experiences about how managers deal with lackluster workers.

The virtual college classroom is an increasingly common phenomenon, especially, as the story reveals, since the U.S. Congress eliminated the requirement that colleges deliver at least half of their courses in bricks and mortar campuses in order to qualify for federal aid. As a result, nearly 3½million students attended one or more classes in this manner last fall, and the trend will undoubtedly increase in intensity.

[Please click the link below for the complete article -- but then please come on back!]

Classroom of the Future Is Virtually Anywhere – New York Times

Constant reader remembers, MUDGE hopes, that his specialty is web conferencing. Collaboration using the web to share visual information, accompanied, in MUDGE‘s employer’s case, by a teleconference. Couldn’t help but notice that the story, while sometimes wringing hands over the impact of technology, shed very little light on exactly what technology is used to deliver all of these on-line classes.

One gets the impression that, due to the worldwide dispersion of the students illustrated, that the teaching/learning activity is asynchronous, rather than real-time collaboration.

There’s room for both, I think, since some of the quarrels that traditional professors expressed in the story, about the lack of enriching discussion and feedback, might be partially answered if real time oral discussion were at least a component of a course.

And a very constant reader might recall that, teaching web conferencing is another specialty of this writer. I am by no means qualified or credentialed to teach in college, but every single one of the 3,600 students I’ve taught (yes, in a corporate environment — no frat parties!) over the past five years has been instructed on line, via teleconference with accompanying web conference.

Definitely viable. Add telepresence (here and here) for those PhD dissertation defenses, and the deal is done. Another paradigm shift rumbling underfoot…

Can’t help but wonder, though.

The U.S. higher education system, wonder of the planet, has also increased its fees so consistently that tuition growth has long outpaced (doubled? tripled? higher?) the domestic rate of inflation, however it’s computed.

One student in five took one or more on-line classes last year. Anyone notice tuition going down as a result of the undoubted smaller operations costs?

It’s it for now. Thanks,

–MUDGE

MUDGE’s Musings

Well, it’s been a long, been a long, been a long, been a long day.

Moderated a meeting on location first thing this morning, which was routine except for the web conference participation: Ireland, Argentina, Japan, the Netherlands, and most places between. Oh, yes, and one of the speakers was connecting from just outside Rome.

Sometimes I really, really like my job.

This afternoon, performed another one of MUDGE’s rare personal appearances: a training class on-site, rather than behind the protection of a telephone call and a web conference. Fortunately, it was an easy audience, and turned out to be quite well received.

Then, after the usual hour-long commute, broken up today by a succession of phone calls (hands-free, of course), arrived home to make silly faces at the neighbor’s toddler grandson, passing by in this generation’s version of a “Daddy Blue Car.”

And then, after a quick change to leisure clothes, off to the lakefront, for a picnic with close friends, and a free evening concert by the lagoon.

Catching up with friends was the draw; the concert itself was okay: a very competent event band, complete with a panoply of singers, horns, electric this and that, and, oddly, three women playing violins.

Competent, and we were sitting far enough away that conversation with our dear friends was possible throughout.

Then, home and an all too rare stint on the recumbent exercise bike watching the Cubs finish up a win and the Sox a loss.

And now, heading toward 11:00pmCDT, blogging.

So, it’s been a long, but far from routine, day.

Routine is good. Changing it occasionally is deluxe.

Oh, and the clip at the top. In case you didn’t recognize the show, it’s Frank Loesser’s How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, always fun, even, perhaps especially, when performed by enthusiastic amateurs. They made a movie of How to Succeed… in the mid- to late 60s — check it out.

It’s it for now. Thanks,

–MUDGE

Summer Saturday. Errands, and more errands. Chores. When’s the week start, so I can relax?

A DVD matinée. Very little time to blog. Ouch.

So, back into the archives yet again.

I console myself by guessing that most of you weren’t here nine months ago. As one of my favorite paper publications used to say: “If you haven’t read it yet, it’s new for you!”

Blast from the Past!

A post we really, really loved to write, and read, and re-read…

From last fall, and always in season, originally posted October 11, 2007, and originally titled “mm167: Writer’s Diarrhea.”

MUDGE’S Musings

… is the opposite of writer’s block, right?

So another blog about blogging. Why bother? Take two Imodium and call me in the morning.

There’s never a lack of news and features to write about. Although, today…

There are frequently referenced topics in this space that could stand another post, MUDGE: web conferencing, our latest profession.

Or, the odd current interest (some of you must feel) in UAVs: unmanned aerial vehicles or, robot aircraft.

Or, politics: impeachment (first Cheney, then Bush); Michael Bloomberg; this horribly mismanaged war.

Or, air travel, probably our most popular topic (thanks, Patrick Smith [who actually noticed and commented on one of our several references to his wonderful column -- talk about finding a plankton in the Pacific]!).

Or, technology, especially One Laptop Per Child, a wonderful initiative deserving of everyone’s support.

But not today.

Spent spare time today reading about blogs and blogging. As I evaluate my efforts according to some of the experts, I give myself a grade of B+. Ignoring the experts, who probably would hold their noses and call L-HC a D+.

Because, of course, there are so few readers. And of course, there’s no monetization going on (just as well, since there are so few readers). So, why bother?

It doesn’t take much reflection to realize that the millions of bloggers out there are primarily, with some gaudy exceptions, keeping personal journals. A custom, and habit, recently revived from the eighteenth and 19th centuries.

The difference is that what used to be kept locked up in a desk or closet is now published to the world in a technological tour de force unprecedented in history. And no quill pens, ink wells and blotters required.

Quantitatively, even with billions of potential readers out there, most of the millions of blogs and bloggers will go unnoticed.

Qualitatively, most of us deserve the lack of notice.

But, this newly awakened urge to write, for most of us, is probably not about notice. It’s about expression.

After scores of years passively accepting written and broadcast news and entertainment, we’re once again entertaining ourselves, by writing.

And our diaries, no longer locked away in desk drawers, hang out as strings of electronic plankton just waiting for an admiring public to suck them in through the baleen called Firefox.

For most of us a few people pop in occasionally, and once in a while a small fraction of those take the trouble to comment about what they’ve read.

Thanks for noticing!

And, thanks, also, to the experts, whose blogs about blogging make for interesting reading.

A few who made an impression (in no particular sequence), a couple of whom have today earned a spot in the L-HC blogroll :

• Performancing
• BloggingTips
• Successful Blog
• ProBlogger
• Copyblogger
• Circular Communication

Any of these are worthy of some time and attention, should you be interested in improving your game, or joining this phenomenon of the Naughts: the electronic diary.

And yes, I’m an easy grader. The B+ is because I enjoy reading what I write.

A hobby that gives one pleasure (and prevents one’s brains leaking out due to any exposure to “Are you smarter than a fifth grader?”) seems like a worthy end in itself, regardless of its infinitesimal interest outside this nanocorner of the ‘Sphere©.

And if this hobby fills a few moments of a few intrepid readers’ spare time, sparing them from “CSI Omaha,” how bad can it be?

Not bad at all. B+ for sure.

It’s it for now. Thanks,

–MUDGE

© Ron Chapple Studios | Dreamstime.com

Web Conferencing Week

So, if this were really a weekly feature, we’d be on number 052 or something, and this is only number 14. Thus, why not two in a row?

The poor sap fallen asleep over his laptop in front of his desktop PC in the illustration doesn’t resemble yr (justifiably) humble svt in the slightest, but it’s what I’ll look like in a few hours.

No, I won’t suddenly get 35 years younger, grow back a lot of very dark hair and become vaguely Asian.

But, I’m working very late tonight, and very early in the morning. Sigh.

As I’ve often noted in this space, I support the enterprise web conferencing application from an end-user perspective. A vendor once described me most flatteringly as the manager of the end user experience for my technology.

So, in addition to working with the other, more technical, members of the team (server administrators and system architects); developing curriculum and reference materials; teaching nearly 4,000 fellow employees in the past six years to use web conferences  by attending my training web conferences; besides all that, I’m the guy who gets the call when users have critical conferences that require my professional expertise.

Got the call a few weeks ago: we’re doing an important meeting three times, because the sun never sets on our global enterprise: once for the Asia-Pacific region, once for Europe and once for the Western Hemisphere. 8amCEST, 1pmCEST, 6pmCEST. We’ve had trouble with the web conferencing tool in the past, please help.

I endeavor to honor requests like this. But, of course, I’m sitting in the U.S. Central time zone.

8amCEST (Central European Summer Time) in, yes, central Europe, the origin of the meetings, translates to 1amCDT (U.S. Central Daylight Time).

1pmCEST is 6amCDT.

6pmCEST will be the only reasonably convenient (to this U.S. based employee) session, 11amCDT.

Tonight, or rather, early tomorrow morning, is the night.

So, and this is after a typical workday that began at 7:20am this morning in our Northern Illinois office, shortly I’ll set up my laptop, verify a good VPN connection to the network, test the server and then wait it out until 1am, a little more than three hours away as I write this. Got my cell phone (loud) alarm set for 12:45am just in case the above photo is destiny.

Then, after the first session, I’ll head to bed for my beauty sleep (never worked before, but there’s always hope), dreaming peacefully for the long, quiet hours until the alarm goes off at its usual 5:10am (maybe three hours if I’m fortunate).

Hopping out of bed, I’ll have time to shower and dress and be ready for the 6am session; thence to the office for the odd team meeting and the 11am session. And in the U.S. afternoon, I’ll be assisting another group with their four-hour session, this time in person, in a large conference space.

And can I take the next day off, in compensation? No such good fortune, as I have a commitment to assist yet another team with their critical meeting, again, in person.

What is ironic about all this is I am a champion night owl. Lots of nights, admittedly weekend nights, where the opportunity, if not the reality, exists for sleeping in, I’ll still be reasonably wide awake at midnight, 1am, and later. Tonight though, I HAVE to be awake at 1am. Not nearly any fun at all!

I am not complaining about all this, because I really love my job (in these parlous times EVERYBODY who has a job MUST love it!); no, really I do.

But, where else can I vent, except to you, faithful reader.

So, thanks for providing me the opportunity to pull aside the curtain, when most people pay no attention. After all, I haven’t had to support a conference in the middle of the night since last October. A couple of times a year is no big deal.

Yawn.

It’s it for now. Thanks,

–MUDGE

Peter Wynn Thompson for The New York Times

Web Conferencing Week

Telepresence is the most exciting luxury class concept since the Learjet.

Telepresence is the advanced version of videoconferencing first exposed in this nanocorner of the ‘Sphere© last 01-August-2007 in WcW004, and then updated in WcW010 24-October-2007.

It’s videoconferences gone ultra high definition, and it just made its way out of the trade press ghetto, into the mainstream in today’s New York Times.

As Travel Costs Rise, More Meetings Go Virtual

By STEVE LOHR | Published: July 22, 2008

Jill Smart, an Accenture executive, was skeptical the first time she stepped into her firm’s new videoconferencing room in Chicago for a meeting with a group of colleagues in London. But the videoconferencing technology, known as telepresence, delivered an experience so lifelike, Ms. Smart recalled, that “10 minutes into it, you forget you are not in the room with them.”

Accenture, a technology consulting firm, has installed 13 of the videoconferencing rooms at its offices around the world and plans to have an additional 22 operating before the end of the year.

Accenture figures its consultants used virtual meetings to avoid 240 international trips and 120 domestic flights in May alone, for an annual saving of millions of dollars and countless hours of wearying travel for its workers.

As travel costs rise and airlines cut service, companies large and small are rethinking the face-to-face meeting — and business travel as well. At the same time, the technology has matured to the point where it is often practical, affordable and more productive to move digital bits instead of bodies.

These telepresence studios are not cheap (as much as $350,000 at each end!) compared to the standard issue videoconference suite; just as that first Learjet wasn’t as cheap as a first class airline ticket, until the green eyeshade folks got a look at the productivity gains and the outright savings.

My niche of the corporate IT world is web conferencing: a telephone conference enhanced with a live on-line display of presentation materials and shared PC desktops. There is no doubt that allowing participants to attend meetings from their desks, as opposed to driving or flying or even walking down the corridor is a time, productivity and money saver. It’s hard not to see how $millions can be saved, even at low resolution, or, for thousands of our meetings a month, without live video at all.

And in this age of high fuel prices, which make travel of any kind even more expensive, and air travel (unless you rate that Learjet!) confiscatory AND unpleasant, instead of merely costly and inconvenient, such virtual meetings, especially for excruciatingly high paid executive suite denizens, are an idea whose time is finally ripe.

Corporate training and education is a field many companies are moving online, in part to trim travel costs. Darryl Draper, the national manager of customer service training for Subaru of America, used to travel four days a week, nine months of the year, presenting educational programs at dealers nationwide. Today, Ms. Draper rarely travels and nearly all of her training is done online.

Previously, Ms. Draper estimated, in six months she would reach about 220 people at a cost of $300 a person. She said she now reaches 2,500 people every six months at a cost of 75 cents a person.

The basic web conferencing technology supported by the team I work with has shown a steady ascending slope of growth, reflecting its benefits, for the nearly six years I have been working with it.

As Travel Costs Rise, More Meetings Go Virtual – NYTimes.com

As I’ve written previously, our on-line technology often accompanies high level videoconferences, since videoconferences, at least in the low definition world I inhabit, are better at managerial faces than typefaces. So we show the slides on a separate screen via web conference, adjacent to the screen that shows a table full of people looking at a screen that shows a table full of people.

The few illustrations I’ve seen of those telepresence suites show people so clearly, but never show presentations or documents, although the Times story mentions image magnification. So I’m thinking that there’s still room for my technology even in the new, exalted world of sharper than high definition conferencing.

My employer spends its capital carefully, and thus far I’m not aware of any such installation here at the Heart of Corporate America. But, in the age of $140++/bbl oil, and a product that, if used regularly, can pay for itself in a year or less, such an investment can’t help but be attractive, even to the manhole cover spenders.

But, now that it’s been exposed in mass media, I’m thinking that sooner than not, I’ll be called in to coordinate a web conference to accompany a session where the video is so sharp we’ll be able to see our European colleague’s glittering blue eyes.

“Get me makeup!”

It’s it for now. Thanks,

–MUDGE

© Duncan De young | Dreamstime.com

MUDGE’s Musings

Spent the day writing.

Spent the last 90 minutes trolling the ‘Sphere for good topics with which  yr (justifiably) humble svt could wax heroic with strong opinions and typically pithy bons mots.

But when it came time to pull one of them up and start waxing and pithing, I found myself out of steam.

Because I spent the day writing. That pesky day job that pays (many of) the bills.

Writing a draft communication to three separate communities regarding our team’s upcoming (that light at the end of the tunnel might be an onrushing train) upgrade to the web conferencing application we support.

It was a challenge, about 17 pages (no big type! no pictures!) all told between the three documents, although there was much duplication and paraphrasing between them.

So, no glass half full, or glass half empty conversations tonight.

This glass is done.

Check back here next time, because first thing tomorrow I’m headed to the wordsmith station for a fill up. Hope I can afford today’s high priced blend.

It’s it for now. Thanks,

–MUDGE

Web Conferencing Week

Once again, this occasional series has failed in its nominal attempt to appear on any kind of regular basis. Not so much a lack of enthusiasm as simply a lack of news.

I’ve been working with the team that is preparing to roll out the latest and greatest version of our software, IBM Lotus Sametime, testing, preparing the teaching curriculum, and generally filling the gaps in a very extensive task list. The effort has been lengthy, not least because of its magnitude, especially when measured against the minute size of the team. Really, there are just two people in the enterprise with full time responsibilities for the Sametime collaboration tools; thankfully the other is a tremendously gifted, spirited and hard-working technical architect who works out of his home office in Colorado.

Finally, the light at the end of the tunnel has resolved itself: it’s NOT an oncoming train, and we believe we’re mere weeks away from D-Day.

It’s been a time.

Meanwhile, I’ve suspended my classes in preparation for an entirely new approach to the educational process; after more than 650 of them in the past 5-1/2 years, for nearly 4,000 students, management has decided to turn over training responsibilities to our division’s Learning & Development group. I have mixed feelings about this, as I’ve grown rather fond of the process of teaching (NOT fond enough to follow the curriculum to that particular group!); 650 one-to-two-hour classes is probably more than enough for a while.

You may recall that this teaching is all conducted on-line, using Sametime web conference technology, together with a telephone conference call. Such remote teaching has its own challenges; there is much reduced feedback available, since there are no faces nor body language to read.

But, this has worked for me, since, as anyone can tell from the likeness published at the top of this nanocorner of the ‘Sphere©, I’ve a great face for radio. So, a form of radio such teaching is. And, without a live audience (the great old radio series seem to have had live audiences), without that rich feedback, it’s quite hard work.

Not for everybody. Ask the person from aforesaid learning & development group who failed to master the material and the challenge two years running (the second year, she barely even tried).

So, I’ve suspended my classes, mainly because as we get so close to releasing the updated tools, I feel it’s unethical to be training people on the ones that are going away so soon.

But there are exceptions to all positions.

Which is how I found myself this afternoon, in a hotel conference room delivering a streamlined version of my introduction to web conferencing class to a live audience of twenty-five newly hired field specialists, undergoing several days of intense immersion into their new responsibilities. As field workers, such collaboration tools as those I champion are even more important than they are to we home office types.

And, although I always push back when asked to teach in person, these folks would all be using their newly issued corporate laptop PCs, and that mitigated my usual dislike of such live instruction. In my experience, for my class, standing in front of a room of people showing them a presentation is just a demonstration, not a training class. This promised to be a training class. And, the sponsor who invited me assured me that these new workers would get plenty of use of the tools in the next few weeks, making it more worthwhile for them, and for yr (justifiably) humble svt to teach them.

So, there I was, standing in front of a mostly interested audience (pointing out, as I expressed it to them, that I was the only thing standing between them and the golf course, or the nearby watering hole), working with them interactively on their PCs and mine.

I’m pretty good at this.

And it was refreshing to work with real people for a change, rather than the disembodied voices and occasional electronically raised hands and group chat queries that are my usual feedback.

Of course, it was just as grueling, if not more so, than the same course conducted remotely, just in different ways. My damaged ankle, yet to heal completely, hidden away under dress slacks rather than protected in hard plastic and velcro, complained, and still is complaining hours later, with some vigor at the indignity of its owner standing on it for two hours with only 20% of the support provided by said pneumatic boot. Not a slow transition out of the boot at all. Sorry, Achilles.

But, even in total wellness, teaching for a living is hard work. Thankfully, long since passed are any concerns about speaking in public. Don’t know when that actually happened, really, but it comes mainly from knowing the material cold. And my audience seemed to get it, and that’s the best feedback of all.

So, another interesting and new experience. Always good that, six-plus years in, there are interesting and new experiences still available in this roller-coaster ride called web conferencing.

It’s it for now. Thanks,

–MUDGE

Whew!

Just finished a very long day, the first day attending the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston.

I don’t go to so many conferences. In fact, in the nearly four years of employment at the Heart of Corporate America (not its real name), as well as the three years of contractor status that it, this is only the second conference that I have attended under the HCA aegis. How ironic that it is also located in Boston, the site of the event that I attended last summer. Of all the towns in the world…

But, I do like Boston, even though, as alluded to last post, I feel stranded in the middle of a desert, located as we are in a concrete jungle of a redeveloped industrial district. Boston is a wonderful town in which to be a pedestrian — but not in this corner, not that I could pedestre very well anyway. [Looks like I may have coined another word -- the 'r' is silent; but it does sort of look like pederast, doesn't it. Oh, well, back to the drawing board.]

Although I title this Day 1, the event’s organizers, as is often done apparently, treated today as Day 0, Monday being the more popular business travel day than Sunday. The sessions today were lengthy tutorials. A choice of two each, morning and afternoon. 9am to 12:30pm; then 1:30pm to 4:45pm. Then a further two hour panel discussion that finally ended at 7:30pm. The real action starts tomorrow. I’m already worn out.

I do take copious notes. Now, many of my fellow attendees today, perhaps most of them, brought their laptops to the sessions. There were even power strips scattered along the floor, for the first half-dozen lucky people each who got to them.

Now, yr (justifiably) humble svt would have been happy enough to note take via laptop, but as there were no tables, just rows of chairs, and as I, uh, don’t have a lap for said laptop, just a short slippery slope as it were, that might result in a potentially lethal slide for same, I took my notes the old fashioned way, pen on notebook page, six tightly printed pages to be exact. I have a lot to show for 8-3/4 hours of conference. But it all has to be transcribed.

I wanted to keep up with this daily; perhaps even transfer some of this post into the event’s blog that I’ve heard exists although I haven’t found it. But, as I type this it’s already 10pm; had too much to eat at the hotel’s surprisingly good restaurant (surprising mainly because they have no competition for at least the half-mile radius until another hotel appears in this wasteland called the Seaport neighborhood); and I was up early. Never sleep well in anyone else’s bed except my own, and the hotel is justifiably proud of its comfortable bed. I’m just a crotchety old curmudgeon.

Anyway, there are six pages. Let’s see if I can summarize, while it’s all still fresh.

1. Social Computing Platforms: IBM and Microsoft.

This was a pair of dueling product demonstrations chaired by an analyst from the Burton Group, one of the respected observational consultancies in the IT field. The products on offer: IBM Lotus Connections vs. Microsoft Sharepoint.

This session was of particular interest to yours truly, as I have been participating as an ex officio (don’t believe I have the status for official membership) of a technical review board at HCA evaluating those two products, with the aim of adopting one of them for the enterprise.

Social media, Web 2.0, is what the world outside corporations has been using for quite some time: blogs, wikis, MySpace/Facebook and the like. Corporations, especially those with an influx of twenty-something college graduates they’re hiring in unexpectedly large numbers, considering the state of the economy, due probably to unexpectedly large numbers of Boomer retirees, find that these new employees expect Web 2.0 tools in the workplace to mirror those they use in their personal places.

As the two foremost providers of collaboration software in the enterprise space, IBM Lotus and Microsoft have responded to the demand with their competing products.

Of the two, Lotus Connections tells a better, more comprehensive, prettier story. Microsoft Sharepoint is spare to the point of a Google-like stark simplicity.

They both offer blogs, wikis, profiles (the MySpace/Facebook piece) in varying degrees of completeness. They both offer integration into the email and other collaboration products that are the two standards of the corporate communication world: Lotus Notes and Microsoft Outlook respectively. They both have their strengths. At this stage in their development, I would have to give the nod to Connections. I haven’t used it yet, although the plan is to start testing it shortly after my return. But I have used Sharepoint, and after today’s presentation I know I will like Connections, sight unseen, better.

2. Unified Communications Comparative Analysis.

This session was paneled by a representative from Frost & Sullivan, another respected observational consultancy. Five different vendors spent about 25 minutes each presenting their interpretation of UC, the convergence of telephonic communications, heading more and more toward VOIP, with web based collaboration tools such as instant messaging, web conferencing (my two areas of concentration at HCA), audio conferencing, video conferencing, etc.

A colleague and I will be exploring some of the elements of UC that will be available as we roll out our update to IBM Lotus Sametime mid-summer, so this session also held much interest.

The five presenters all came at the field from their own positions of strength. IBM Lotus has the software killer app in the form of Sametime, which has long sported integration with IP telephony and even with conventional wired audio conferencing, although we at HCA are only now on the cusp of getting to that rarified version. Many of the other vendors have partnered with IBM to offer their own integrations with Sametime. The idea is to be able to look at a small browser with lists of frequently accessed colleagues (the wretchedly named “buddy list”), and click to instant message, or click to place a PC to PC call, or click to place a PC to land line call, etc.

It’s good stuff, converging toward the point where it won’t matter where you are, what phone you have near you, your colleagues will find you and you them, just by selecting them from that browser. As our Frost & Sullivan analyst pointed out, the bad news is that last year’s buzzword of work – life balance now becomes this year’s trend of work – life blending. Not necessarily a welcome development for us codgers; but definitely 2.0 for the kids.

For all of the vendors, the low hanging fruit in this business is VOIP, which offers quantified return on investment (the holy ROI), and even there, my employer is only slowly getting there, mainly by mandating that all green field (i.e., new) sites use that better mousetrap for telephony. Legacy sites, such as the infrastructure including thousands and thousands of long since depreciated but to our CFO perfectly useful PBX phones, will get there only slowly. And that’s with quantifiable ROI.

Unified Communications has a problem. Its advantages are more challenging to measure. Improved productivity is hard to put a number to. But, our glinty-eyed CFO should be drooling at the concept of work – life blending. After all, he’s only going to pay us for eight hours per workday, not the 168 hours per week that we’ll be exposed to UC.

[In that vein: when I joined the group I presently work with in Corporate IT, it was a big deal to be issued a Blackberry. I was perhaps the 225th person in the organization to get one, and that only because I worked in the group that supports them, not that I was entitled by any rarefied status. The Blackberry impacted our organization from the top down; we originally got into the business because our CEO wanted to handle his email from the corporate jet.

[The VP of our group simply hated them; mainly I think because she resented people responding to their buzzing interruptions to her meetings. She's long since retired, and there are probably close to 4,000 Blackberries in the enterprise by now. I hope no one has told her!

[Even so, one would think that even, no especially, our CFO would insist that all 70,000 of us be issued them. Same as Unified Communication: 168 hours/week availability for the cost of 40, plus a couple of grand a year for the device and its airtime each. Cheap at the price, one would have thought. That's one reason why I'm not the CFO, I guess.]

All five vendors who presented today made good cases for their flavor of UC; all of them sounded, and their demos looked, pretty much the same. It’s not anywhere near a mature industry yet, and I expect that there will be shakeouts and combinations galore in the next few years.

3. Evening in the Cloud

This was an intriguing panel discussion, flashily produced, regarding the bleeding edge technology called cloud computing. Cloud computing is what Google Apps and Salesforce.com and Amazon Web Services (tonight’s three vendor presenters) would like all IT organizations to adopt wholesale. Let us take over your applications and data. We’re cheaper, because we offer huge economies of scale, securer, more knowledgeable than you are. It’s “Software as a Service,” one of this year’s most potent buzzwords, taken to its ultimate degree.

The four other panelists were CXO’s (fancy IT-speak for Chief Technology Officers, Chief Information Officers — the heads of IT for their respective organizations) of organizations who are potential clients of cloud computing.

This was a fascinating couple of hours, with a lot of give and take. The cloud computing guys were absolutely at the peak of their games, VPs of marketing and the like, and made convincing cases for their products. The CXO’s had good, insightful questions and comments.

When they finally through the meeting to the floor, yours truly hustled to the microphone. As I told them, by that time, 7:00pm, I had been ingesting data and information for 10 hours straight, and in the spirit of the 2.0 theme of the conference, I felt it was incumbent on me to contribute, in the form of a couple of questions.

It wasn’t my greatest stint in front of a microphone, nor my worst. Got patient answers to my rather feisty questions.

The ramifications of cloud computing are dire for we peons in IT. Already we see the (help desk) support function heading toward the low cost providers in Manila and Bengaluru and Sofia. If they send the hardware into the Amazon-Google-Salesforce clouds, that’s another huge swath of IT personpower that goes away in favor of those denizens of said clouds.

Fellow gearheads, better be prepared to join your brothers and sisters, the displaced shoe manufacturing workers and textile weaving workers and furniture makers, and Hummer builders, in the reeducation lines.

Whew! Wrote more than I thought I could. Go figure. Might be all the iced tea and restaurant mellow coffee that will probably leave me buzzing for a few more hours. Sigh.

More (writing, not caffeine), I hope, tomorrow evening.

It’s it for now. Thanks,

–MUDGE

We have written appreciatively on the topic of working from home (most colorfully, courtesy Stanley Bing, here; more philosophically, here).

Telecommuting is a fancier term. Telework is the jargon chosen by Stephen Barr of the Washington Post, reporting on a bill working its way through Congress to permit federal employees to do so.

Telework Bill Cleared by the House

Federal Diary | By Stephen Barr |Wednesday, June 4, 2008; Page D03

A bill that would permit many federal employees to telecommute at least two days every two weeks was approved by the House yesterday on a voice vote.

Under the bill, federal agencies would be required to create and implement policies to enable eligible employees to work from home or away from their regular office as long as telecommuting did not hamper their performance or interfere with agency operations.

Telework advocates and union officials have been pushing for expanded telecommuting programs in the government for two years, and the House action enhances the chances of Congress sending a bill to the president this year.

Similar legislation has been approved by a Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, but a committee report has not been released, a step needed before the bill can come to the Senate floor. There are some differences between the House and Senate bills that will have to be resolved, but a compromise is likely because the concept of expanded telecommuting in the government has drawn substantial bipartisan support.

Yr (justifiably) humble svt is a serious devotee of working from home. Faced with a sixty-mile round trip, variable weather and pervasive road renewal (two seasons in Chicago: winter, and under construction), equipped with a competent broadband connection and company issued laptop PC, I feel that I could be a poster child (okay, poster codger) for the working from home concept.

Modern technology, such as the web conferencing and instant messaging tools that I support, make it possible to collaborate with employees, vendors and clients anywhere in the world from any office anywhere, even the one over your garage.

Happy to have Congress, never, on the evidence, an expert on work of any kind (that sounds a bit like Samuel Clemens, doesn’t it?), stoop to consider such an innovation.

[Please click the link below for the complete article -- but then please come on back!]

Stephen Barr – Telework Bill Cleared by the House – washingtonpost.com

As the story notes, Congress has awakened to the fact that corporate America is well ahead on this issue.

IBM, for example, has institutionalized the concept for many of its 375,000 worldwide employees. A truly substantial number, perhaps as many as 25%, have no office in an IBM owned or leased facility. They have space, perhaps “hotel” space, in their clients’ facilities, or they work from their home offices. At MUDGE‘s employer, our IBM support liaison works in any spare cubical found in our office three days, his own home office the other two.

IBM gets its client facing people literally in their clients’ faces, and avoids incredible amounts not spent on commercial square footage, heat, light, air conditioning, and the general infrastructure required to support an employee in the big cities they inhabit.

Many other corporations have also recognized the value of telecommuting, but most not to IBM’s extreme.

Stanley Bing notwithstanding, telework is not an engraved invitation to goof off. It allows working mothers to support both elements of that description. It allows working fathers to support their spouses in a way not previously conceived, staying home with a sick child while preparing that monthly report.

Here’s the point of today’s post headline: Not the least attractive element of working from home is that it has the capacity to save significant quantities of gas that would otherwise be expended commuting.

When it costs upwards of $60 to fill a sedan’s gas tank, potentially cutting consumption by 20% per week has the potential to become a non-trivial savings.

Multiply that by 1,800,000 civilian federal employees (if the federal workers bill makes it through the legislative process), admittedly a gross number that doesn’t take into account public facing and security workers that the bill would exclude, and national gas consumption might reduce significantly.

And the government’s example could prove influential to smaller businesses that might not have IBM’s imagination.

As a national energy security strategy, this beats ethanol by a mile.

It’s it for now. Thanks,

–MUDGE

Blast from the Past!

A post we really, really loved to write, and read, and re-read…

From our early days, originally posted August 29, 2007, one of our series called, over-ambitiously, Web Conferencing Week. The entire group can be found on its own page elsewhere on this site.

WCW006: Quiet before the storm

Web Conferencing Week

Late summer doldrums here at the Heart of Corporate America (HCA, not my employer’s real name).

One might hope that the lull in formal activities would provide some time for reflection, and so in fact it has.

As I’ve explained before (here and here and here, for example), as do most people in corporate surroundings, I wear a multitude of hats:

• member of the IT technical team supporting collaborative tools (email, instant messaging, web conferencing);
• teacher of our instant messaging and web conferencing tools to our internal business clients (more than 3,500 served in five years, thank you very much!);
• “manager of the end-user experience” as defined by our vendor’s on-site support manager — while not in the direct flow of help desk activities (at least not yet), the canniest of my 3,500 students, and their underlings and bosses, know me well enough to contact me if they have issues, and since no one on the team, or in the support arena in general has anywhere the amount of experience with our tools as have I (over six hundred classes, all conducted using web conferences, plus countless mission-critical meetings facilitated throughout the enterprise), the answer to my correspondents’ questions is probably at the ready.

As teacher, I’m always running 8-10 classes per month, although during the summer average attendance is way down.

As end-user experience manager (an honorific provided by a suck-up vendor: remember, grunt that MUDGE is, he’s manager of no one) the phone just isn’t ringing very often, as people wrap up their summers before Labor Day provides the symbolic halt to all things sunscreen.

As member of the technical team, decisions are pending and work is progressing.

HCA uses for its instant messaging and web conferencing requirements IBM Lotus Sametime.

HCA has long been a Lotus shop: Its Lotus Notes product has long been handling enterprise email and its rapid application environment supports thousands of database applications and has done so here for more than 15 years. So the choice of Sametime was not a surprise in that light.

And, indeed, Sametime is a common choice for collaboration among large corporations, seeking the rock-solid enterprise grade solution similar and related to the rock-solid technology that so well supports the earlier applications: email and databases.

The best web conferencing and instant messaging choice today?

An excellent question that is not yet on the table.

Like many issues in corporate technology, the problems faced are multi-dimensional: hardware, software, the quantity of personnel applied to the task (fortunately, personnel quality is not an issue, among the talented administrators and architects that I am fortunate to work among).

Instant messaging and web conferencing at HCA exists not as the result of an organized deployment campaign, but rather more like viral marketing. It grew out of a pilot (when I joined the company, about 5½ years ago in a related but not directly connected IT position, there were nominally 800 accounts).

And the pilot became an “extended pilot” which gradually became a production system, without ever really becoming a true, bullet proof enterprise-grade product, at least as implemented here at HCA.

Insufficient servers (both in capability and in numbers), and insufficient personnel (as above, just the numbers are insufficient — the people are champions [and they won't read this, so trust me, I'm not sucking up!]) to keep order in an operation that has grown to more than 26,000 accounts.

This number represents less than half of the available client base, because no one knows how to handle the establishment of the necessary 30,000 new accounts efficiently, much less want to confront the reality of insufficient hardware and personnel to handle the existing organically grown client base.

And, finally, the software. HCA upgraded (quite tardily) to Sametime version 6.5 about 21 months ago, and our team has been working on upgrading to the current standard version 7.5 for nearly that long (remember the tardy part).

HCA never never never never wants to be the early adopter of anyone’s hardware or software. The 100th adopter, maybe, so we delay, by time-honored policy, both IT and fiscal, until (hopefully most of) the bugs are out.

But we really need to move on this upgrade (the 2005 upgrade from long-used version 3.1 to version 6.5 was a marketing nomenclature upgrade — to the end users it looks and acts as if it’s version 3.2!), and the delay has not been HCA’s sole doing. And version 7.5 has many new and attractive and desirable features; it would be a true upgrade.

But we’re not there yet.

And therein lies an interesting story.

But this long story will need to be continued next time, because…

It’s it for now. Thanks,

–MUDGE

But, the Prime Directive of Blogging reads: Thou Shalt Blog Daily! So shalt we.

There’s most read, and then there’s favorite. This is a post which yr (justifiably) humble svt is, regrettably, but not regretfully, not at all humble about.

Blast from the Past!

A post we really, really loved to write, and read, and re-read…

From our early days, originally posted August 1, 2007, our first in our series called, over-ambitiously, Web Conferencing Week. The entire group can be found on its own page elsewhere on this site.

WcW004: Web Conferencing Week – Telepresence: Finally videoconferencing that works

Web Conferencing Week

I do web conferencing. But you might be surprised that videoconferencing is often what my web conference supplements — right there in the conference room.

Videoconferences predate web conferences by many years; although the state of the art is still as primitive as it is, one reluctantly admits, for web conferencing.

It’s all about the bandwidth.

Let’s take a look at this recent story from Computerworld, regarding what appears to be a pricey, but better, mousetrap for the videoconference process.

Telepresence: Finally, videoconferencing that works

It’s still not cheap, but telepresence technology takes videoconferencing a giant step forward. And did we mention that it’s really cool?

John Dickinson

July 31, 2007 (Computerworld) — If necessity really were the mother of invention, enterprises and small businesses would by now have highly functional, standardized videoconferencing and collaboration technology at their disposal. Instead, travel across the continent and around the world remains the dominant collaboration paradigm, despite the ever-increasing pressure of time-consuming security requirements and budget-killing airfare and hotel prices.

Back in the 1960s, the old AT&T Co.’s Western Electric Group demonstrated its Picturephone to a doubting world, and the world has remained doubtful ever since. That’s because videoconferencing systems developed since then have remained expensive and unpredictable, gadgets that usually delivered small, fuzzy, herky-jerky video images, often uncoordinated with people’s voices because of communications latency and unreliability.

When the Internet came along, there was hope that Web conferencing might fill the void, even though it lacks the collaborative impact of video images, relying solely on shared documents, especially presentations. Web conferencing has not been very satisfactory, requiring reserved bandwidth, separate telephone hookups for sound and notoriously troublesome desktop technologies.

[Per L-HC's reformed process, please click the link below for the complete article -- but then please come on back!]

Telepresence: Finally, videoconferencing that works

I ashamedly plead guilty to all of the above limitations of web conferencing. We don’t use reserved bandwidth in our instance, and we’ve finally gotten some priority (called Quality of Service) over competing internal traffic, but bandwidth, the potential sound quality issues of the accompanying telephone conference that still is required for our web conferences due to flaky VOIP (a subject of a future rant, I’m sure) — all of this adds up to a lot of compromise.

Telepresence technology is proposed as a spendy answer to the limits of the primitive state of current videoconferencing, and may well obviate the need for my specialty, web conferencing.

Telepresence configurations can use as few as one HDTV screen or as many as 16. Screens are positioned to be at eye level when local conferees are seated, and the images on the side-by-side screens are “stitched” together so that viewers feel they’re looking at one very wide screen. Speakers are positioned so that the sound appears to emanate from the mouth of the person at the remote site who is talking, not from the center of the table or some random location elsewhere in the room.

Okay so the illustration, provided by one of the vendors, is somewhat idealized, but HOW COOL IS THAT?!

It costs how much?
Telepresence is an expensive technology, and only enterprise customers with large travel budgets can afford it. Once installed, telepresence systems are essentially free to operate, but it’s the installation that’ll get you.

A single-screen Cisco TelePresence system can be installed for $79,000 and a three-screen system for $299,000 per room, according to David Hsieh, Cisco’s director of marketing management. You have to multiply that by the number of rooms planned for the telepresence network.

Teliris VirtuaLive system costs are similar, with a single-screen room costing $60,000 and a four-screen room coming in at $250,000. Those costs include access to the Teliris dedicated network.

It’s expensive, but large enterprises, such as the one that employs yours truly has significant travel budgets, important outposts all over the globe, and the numbers just might work.

“Think of it as a nice substitute for a corporate jet,” says IDC analyst Nora Freedman. That comment is a bit tongue-in-cheek, but Forrester’s Dewing thinks it is realistic. “Figure that at Cisco, they’ve cut their corporate travel budget by 6% by using their own TelePresence systems internally,” says Dewing, who is familiar with Cisco’s internal usage pattern. “I don’t know the exact number, but that’s a pretty big hit.”

The factor that remains the greatest limiter to success with this otherwise ferociously attractive technology, is as with web conferencing I’ve learned the hard way these past five years, the state of the network.

The network is key
Networking has always been the Achilles’ heel of traditional videoconferencing, and it’s still a concern with telepresence. If the video isn’t smooth and perfectly coordinated with the audio in real time, the whole system devolves to being just like traditional videoconferencing. That’s important, says Ferguson. “With traditional videoconferencing, you can only sit there for about an hour. But with telepresence technology, a two- or three-hour meeting is quite reasonable,” he says.

As a result, one vendor runs their systems on a proprietary network, increasing the opportunity for a successful connection, but obviously representing an increment over using existing corporate network facilities.

Here’s how it hits conventional web conferencing:

[Teliris'] Telepresence Gateway can also communicate with traditional videoconference technologies, such as those offered by Polycom, and Web conferencing technologies such as WebEx and Microsoft’s LiveMeeting. Teleris also offers WebConnect, a Web-based telepresence product that enables a conference participant who is unable to be at a VirtuaLive-equipped site to join a conference. As Dewing points out, you don’t need expensive telepresence for applications like telecommuting, but linking traditional systems into telepresence systems can give those applications a boost.

I’m certainly aching to learn how soon our vendor, IBM/Lotus will provide a communications interface to this awesome tool for its Sametime web conferencing tool.

Because, no one has mentioned it to me (crawling around in the trenches as I do), but I’m certain one or more of those fancy installations is either planned, or already installed somewhere in the enterprise I call home.

And, let me explain why web conferencing tools even belong in the conversation about videoconferencing.

You still need to see the presentation, and a web conference provides a very elegant solution. At some of our organization’s highest level meetings, with video going out to several important sites, I’m sitting near the audio and video techs in the room sending out the slides via web conference, because they’re much easier to read in a medium optimized for presentations. The standard procedure is to use one of the screens in the receiving videoconference rooms for the web conference feed.

Notice the illustrations above: people — big beautiful high definition people — but not documents. That’s the job of web conferencing, and I want in on that telepresence action. Soon!

It’s it for now. Thanks,

–MUDGE

But, the Prime Directive of Blogging reads: Thou Shalt Blog Daily! So shalt we.

There’s most read, and then there’s favorite. This is a post which yr (justifiably) humble svt is, regrettably, but not regretfully, not at all humble about.

Blast from the Past!

A post we really, really loved to write, and read, and re-read…

From our early days, originally posted July 28 2007, our first in our series called, over-ambitiously, Web Conferencing Week. The entire group can be found on its own page elsewhere on this site.

WcW003: Web Conferencing Week – Sometimes it’s all about teaching

Web Conferencing Week

As filled with unusualities as was last week, this past week… was not.

The main theme was teaching. We wrote about this facet of my career quite extensively in mm018 and I don’t feel compelled to rehash here. It’s a significant portion of my responsibilities here at HCA (Heart of Corporate America remember, not its real name).

And, like all things everywhere, it either dies or changes. I vote for change.

For more than a year, we’ve been attempting to turn over some of the basic courses to an expert in our division’s training department. To that end I’ve provided annotated course material, one on one instruction, the opportunity to practice. I am this good teacher, right?

It’s been a bust. Last year the explanation was that the designated person didn’t start that year with this goal in her list of goals, and thus was unable to devote the time and attention required to mastering the material.

This year began with this turnover on this person’s the goals list, but after a kick-off meeting in February, and prompt transmission of updated curriculum to answer some concerns, the person has simply not responded to my queries for nearly three months.

I’ve been teaching this material for so long I suppose I have underestimated its challenges. You simultaneously are teaching a collaboration tool while smoothly utilizing that tool to deliver the lessons. And in order to teach effectively, you are attempting to interact with your students using a very limited sensory array, just their voices and whatever of the conference’s tools they are able to begin to understand.

Pretty demanding, upon reflection, and I believe totally overwhelming for the training department’s MIA “expert.”

So, Plan B. Our vendor has a partnership with an organization in the UK that has produced some workmanlike Computer Based Training (CBT) modules that I’ve persuaded our department to purchase on an enterprise basis. These don’t provide the HCA-specific content that so richly fills my curriculum, but as our IT division’s underlying software philosophy is to customize purchased applications as little as possible, the generic CBT should be quite sufficient, at least for the basics.

The idea always was to remove some of the repetitive burden of teaching the “level 100″ coursework (originally to a live instructor), leaving the advanced curriculum, as well as individualized instruction for higher level personnel to yours truly.

So, this week: mostly teaching. The scheduled three classes, two of them with that 3:00pm start time (to accommodate West Coast participants, a few of whom, I’m thankful to note, were present) that is supremely wearing on me, as this type of teaching seems to demand an energy level more difficult to tap 7½ hours into my business day.

The week’s one conference facilitation gig (my other public responsibility — and hey, it’s July!) turned out also to be about teaching, although that was not the intention of that meeting’s leader, nor mine.

Arrived at the designated conference room a few minutes earlier than the routine 30-minute lead time called for, to find a dark room, arranged poorly to accommodate my gear, and without a built in projector for the expected live audience, or a speakerphone for the conference.

Then the leader arrived, simultaneously with the caterer with a snack array (odd for an 11:00am meeting), which mystified that leader, who by the way arrived without a portable projector.

Her assistant apparently had misconstrued the purpose and intent of the meeting, which it turned out could have been much more conveniently conducted from the leader’s office, since there was no expected audience in the room; the presentation was meant to be transmitted solely to a conference room at a facility in Massachusetts.

Okay, so I walked down to the nearby Audio-Visual crew office, to request that a technician deliver and install a speakerphone (which had not been ordered by that assistant), and we determined that as it was just the presenter and me that we could forego a projector, and simply sit together at one of the 12 tables in the room and work off of my laptop.

So, with much conversation about the assistant’s misinterpretation of the leader’s instructions, which concluded with my promise to forward said person (a former student, who apparently assumed that she understood web conferencing because she took my course; well in her defense the two of us had lots of popcorn and canned soda available!) a document we created a couple of years ago and which is posted on our website titled “Successful Sametime Conferences,” a checklist which calls out key requirements like projectors and speakerphones.

But as we waited for the 11:00am conference start, the discussion turned to what she does: Corporate Learning and Development, and her group’s increasing need to respond to the globalization of our employer. It is a small measure of the silos permeating HCA that she had no idea of what I do (the teaching part I mean) or how I deliver it. And we’re both part of same broad corporate organization.

Meanwhile, we sat on the phone, and in the web conference, patiently awaiting our Massachusetts audience to join us. 11:00am goes by, 11:05, 11:10, nada.

She gets up and uses the house phone outside the room to contact a different assistant, who phoned back shortly thereafter to report that the HR manager at the other end who had requested the presentation, and had called more than once to confirm that it was on the schedule, had suddenly that morning decided that her team had higher priorities that day and had unilaterally canceled the session, apparently without notifying anyone outside of Massachusetts. Ouch.

And, while my direct customer is not the subject of this next Life Lesson, her customers certainly qualify:

So, a lot of furor for nothing. But, a good outcome, selfishly for me, and perhaps for her organization, since I was told that I will be asked to an upcoming meeting of the Learning and Development management team to discuss my globe-spanning technology (and perhaps more?).

What on earth took them so long?

It’s it for now. Thanks,

–MUDGE

But, the Prime Directive of Blogging reads: Thou Shalt Blog Daily! So shalt we.

There’s most read, and then there’s favorite. This is a post which yr (justifiably) humble svt is, regrettably, but not regretfully, not at all humble about.

Blast from the Past!

A post we really, really loved to write, and read, and re-read…

From our early days, originally posted July 22, 2007, one in our series called, over-ambitiously, Web Conferencing Week. The entire group can be found on its own page elsewhere on this site.

WcW002: Web Conferencing Week – On Location

In our first venture in this direction, WcW001, I described the week just past as filled with unusualities (coined in this space tyvm; if I use it 500 more times, think that it gets added to anyone’s dictionary?), and described one. Here’s another.

Only a few times in the five years I have been plying my trade at the HCA, have I been asked to conduct business outside the friendly confines of the navel of the known universe, our dual expansive campuses and its outlying but nearby satellite sites.

But, Wednesday afternoon I received voicemail from one of my most frequent clients, the sales training functionary for one of our most important product families, asking that I assist Friday at an all-day session emanating from a hotel near the airport.

Sent off a memo to the contact that had been specified, detailing the logistical arrangements that I would require (broadband access, a phone connection for the web conference’s accompanying telephone conference call, a second phone line and phone for monitoring purposes, sufficient power connections, table/chair near the audio technician, etc), received a quick response including the name and contact information for the event handler at the hotel. A quick call to this person confirmed that all would be as required, and her smooth and professional demeanor actually filled me with confidence that it indeed it would.

So, Friday, instead of trundling out to the navel, etc., trundled instead to the vicinity of the airport, to a very nice and upscale hotel, the likes of which grunts such as yours truly work at, but surely can’t afford to stay at.

After the usual flurry of activity around finding the venue, and locating the key contacts among people with whom one has spoken but never before seen (and no one wears red carnations to identify themselves any more — why is that?), located the hotel employee audio technician who was handling the event and, after at my request he arranged the switching out of his equipment table for something large enough for the both of us, began setting up.

The main problem in the morning during the run-up to the start of the broadcast sessions was the speed of the internet connection I was furnished. It seemed that everyone in the hotel was competing for the same not-so-broadband connection, and I found this to be somewhat crippling as I dealt with last minute changes to the presentation.

And, by the way, wireless was not an option. Not only did my laptop not detect wireless access in the room (although others PCs did, so that was a limitation of my equipment), but it is my hard experience that, for a very network-centric application such as a web conference, the flaky nature of most wireless connections is toxic.

As with most web conferencing applications, Lotus Sametime uses two major modes to display information to those connecting to it: screen sharing and its whiteboard. Screen sharing is the simplest mode: whatever the person sharing is doing on her desktop shows up within the screen sharing window in the instance of all participants’ internet browser connected to the meeting.

The meeting room whiteboard is not as simple to use; it requires prior setup to load (or, in Sametime nomenclature, attach) whatever presentation files to be shown. The value add for this setup requirement is that most presentations transmit throughout the network much more efficiently, since the information to be transmitted is cached on the server (i.e., while the current slide is shown, the next one is being loaded into memory, and the previous one remains available).

However, on the dead slow connection I experienced mid-morning at the hotel, the revised version of the presentation file I received could not load into the meeting — the process timed out. This was frustrating.

I persisted, and eventually, late in the morning, and perilously close to the noon start time of the first of the two events taking place in that room, the revision finally got loaded (I’m thinking that the contention for bandwidth on the hotel’s connection eased closer to lunchtime), and I was finally good to go. We connected the audio tech’s phone (running the interface from the room’s sound system so that all those using microphones would be heard on the phone) to the telephone conference operator, and at the proper time the event began.

Meanwhile, in this large conference room, an earlier event not requiring my participation had begun, and I had a chance to observe the participants from the tech table at the front side of the room. Well more than 100 young (everybody in corporate life is younger than yours truly these days!), attractive field sales people were in the midst of a several days long training conference. This day’s meetings were devoted to product knowledge.

Our field sales people have to know well a great deal of technical data, as well as all of the nuts and bolts of technical selling (a topic I’m certain was handled, or reinforced at least, on other days of this conference).

For most applications of web conferencing, usage is quite straightforward. The leader of the meeting connects to the Sametime server, connects his laptop PC to a projector, and uses the screen sharing mode to simultaneously project his presentation in the meeting room while making it available to remote attendees. In smaller meetings, whatever overhead is added for the web conference is minor, and whatever distraction that the electronic meeting may cause usually is minor.

However, for large meetings, that overhead and potential distraction is not acceptable. Early in my web conference facilitation experience I learned that for these types of large-scale events the best approach is to split the function of running the web conference away from the in-room presentation function.

And this is what we did for the meetings in the hotel conference center. This way, there was no spillover from the electronic conference into the meeting room itself; so had there been technical problems, or even communication from the remote participants relevant to the web conference, it would have been invisible to those in the room, and especially to the speakers, whose demonstrated technical expertise might not have extended to the web conferencing arena and whom in any event would not have welcomed such interruptions.

So, the idea is that two copies of the presentation are required: one, for the laptop PC connected to the projector in the conference room. The other, for the PC connected to and leading (“moderating” in Sametime nomenclature) the web conference.

After the energetic activities of preparation described above (and there’s always something in large meetings) things in the first, 50-minute session went quite smoothly, as did most of the second one until the last 90 minutes or so of that four-hour(!) presentation.

The last 90 minutes? Well, the second speaker neglected to mention the existence of, much less share his umpteenth and latest presentation revision with me. Turned out he had about 85 slides; I had only 67. Ouch. So I vamped as best I could (at one point I used my text annotation tool to announce that there were some new slides showing that were unavailable to the web conference).

Well, afterwards, my contact in field sales training consoled me by saying, “how many people do you think were actually paying attention in that last hour?”

And separately, the speaker apologized to me (after all, even those present in the room did not have those slides in their printed handouts) by saying, “they usually only allot me two hours.” Sigh.

But, in the larger context of the day this was minor (the organizers certainly reported so) although that could have been 5 o’clock Friday of a hugely busy week manifesting itself. But, if my customers are happy, so am I (especially if the issue in question was totally outside my ability to rectify).

Could I have anticipated a new version of the presentation? Of course, there almost always is. Could, under the constraints of time (just about 10 minutes from the end of the first meeting to the start of the second) and a suspect broadband connection (remember it took about 90 minutes elapsed time to upload the smaller revision to the first presentation) I have actually accomplished the successful update in time? Perhaps not. Sigh.

While it doesn’t really apply totally to this context, since the speaker was guilty with an excuse (had to fill a lot more time than usual — and by the way, his extended topics were interesting, to this amateur scientist, and relevant). Often, though, the last-minute tweaks that cause this practitioner of meetings so much gut-churning distress are mostly gilding the lily. So, it gives me the opportunity to roll out:

But, overall, a good and an interesting day. Can I apply the science I was exposed to during five-plus hours of presentations to my job, or my everyday life? Absolutely not. Was it interesting, in the context of learning for learning’s sake? Absolutely. Forty-eight hours later as I write this, can I remember any of it? Please don’t ask me that!

All told, an interesting end to a more unusual than usual week in the world of web conferencing.

It’s it for now. Thanks,

–MUDGE

The MUDGE family is on vacation this week. We don’t know that we’ll be able to restrain ourselves from blogging during the entire span, after all the grandMUDGElets go to bed pretty early, but without access to our files, and WindowsLiveWriter, for this week only, when we feel that irresistible urge to blog, we’ll treat blogging like we do (sigh) exercise: we’ll just lie down until the feeling goes away.

But, the Prime Directive of Blogging reads: Thou Shalt Blog Daily! So shalt we.

There’s most read, and then there’s favorite. This is a post which yr (justifiably) humble svt is, regrettably, but not regretfully, not at all humble about.

Blast from the Past!

A post we really, really loved to write, and read, and re-read…

From our early days, originally posted July 20, 2007, our first in our series called, over-ambitiously, Web Conferencing Week. The entire group can be found on its own page elsewhere on this site.

WcW001: Web Conferencing Week

Web Conferencing Week

Trying something different here at Left-Handed Complement — back to my roots, or at least my original intentions for this space, to regularly explore my professional existence. I have previously written about what I do, and my very recent, quite futile aspirations toward management, but it’s been sporadic at best. Not my intention when I started.

This is an attempt to apply some discipline — maybe most work weeks haven’t recently seemed very interesting to me (although the one just completed was altogether not routine), but I believe that what I do is quite unusual in any corporation, small or large, so I’ll explore those unusualities (have I just coined a MUDGE-ism?) in this space, I hope every week or more often.

And, for you completists out there, clicking the “Web Conferencing” tag cloud on the sidebar will catch you up.

The tent-poles for many weeks are the large scale conferences (or even small, but critical ones) for which I provide consultative, or substantive services. This week was busier in that respect than many lately.

For one thing, I assisted a high level HR manager as he ran a focus group with a group of administrative assistants for one of HCA’s (remember, Heart of Corporate America, not it’s real name) most hidebound and traditional divisions, its corporate attorneys. In the year 2007, I must admit it was jarring to hear more than one of these women (and they were all women) refer to themselves as secretaries. Is it any wonder they had a lot to complain about?

My role: to make the HR manager’s slides available to the several administrative assistants connecting from outside the navel of the known universe (the heart of the Heart, as it were), including one humorous (or perhaps I simply mean good humored) person in Europe for whom the meeting started after 5pmCET (Central European Time, did you know?), and for her didn’t finish until about 7pm.

This meeting was both easier, and more complex for me than usual. Easier because there were few enough remote participants, and the slide content was simple enough, that the PowerPoint slide deck could simply be “Screen Shared,” so that those in the meeting room and those connecting remotely watched exactly the same presentation at the same time.

Complex, because I had arrived at the conference center first (always my goal) and found the room dark, furnished correctly but otherwise unprepared electrically and electronically. The electronic podium had been pushed out of the way to accommodate a meeting that I had worked a day and a half earlier, never replaced in position and thus was totally inert.

I dug up an A/V tech, who found a bunch of thick cables in the floor, and (I hoped) matching ones curled up in the podium that needed to be connected, a job that took this stranger (and I thought by this time I knew most of the guys) about 20 minutes. There had to be 30 colored wires with metal connectors for each end among the cabled groups; glad he wasn’t color blind!

I offered the manager the opportunity to sit at a table closer to his group, so as a result I stood by the podium to advance the presentation slides at his command, which I must admit got a little old after 90 minutes (actually, between arriving early, and the meeting starting about 25 minutes late due to the above mentioned technical snafu I was standing for well over two hours, not my favorite way to spend a late morning, especially a late morning under-snacked and under-hydrated). Such is show business.

But the wonderful news, as I related the high points to my manager later that day, was that the technical issues were A/V ones, not web conferencing ones. Whew! Our system has been behaving itself of late, and I don’t take that for granted, working as I do out there among my customers.

My colleagues on the team are, by training and by inclination, telephone support types. Let’s face it, most IT professionals take up the career because they are introverts who are more comfortable relating to hardware and software than the people who consume their work product.

The thought of encountering a real live client having trouble with our technology makes them sick to their stomach, and I’m not really exaggerating — they’ve told me so countless times. So the fact that I go out there so frequently putting my own ego, as well as my team’s reputation on the line, in person, confounds them.

It’s what I do.

But as always, it was fascinating to pay attention to the content of the meeting. This little job of mine provides a very unusual opportunity to be a fly on the wall for some most interesting sessions, and as touched on above this was one of those.

I guess HCA’s corporate law department is stuck in some 1950′s time warp, as distinct from “public” law firms which I have to feel are somewhat more up to date (one person recently arrived from one reported that for the work she and most her colleagues do at HCA, a public firm would describe and compensate them as paralegals, not secretaries).

The attorneys like it this way, I’m sure (more than one of the women described their bosses (male and female) as “needy,” for example working in longhand [on legal pads, I'm sure] and claiming not to know even the basics of their computers), but I don’t understand how the assistants can stand it.

By the way, the IT building I work in must have close to 600 employees; maybe eight of them are administrative assistants, and I’m sure that the bean counters think that this number is twice as large as necessary. We are hardly needy — we do for ourselves.

What I wanted to say to this group of put-upon legal division employees (and of course I didn’t since flies on the wall don’t say a word, ever) was, be thankful you work for whom you do; any other department and there would be half or fewer of you!

And that’s just one of the several meetings and or events this week, and I find that reflecting on it has spent my Friday evening energy, but we’ll renew this effort later this weekend, I promise.

Thanks for indulging me.

It’s it for now. Thanks,

–MUDGE

The MUDGE family is on vacation this week. We don’t know that we’ll be able to restrain ourselves from blogging during the entire span, after all the grandMUDGElets go to bed pretty early, but without access to our files, and WindowsLiveWriter, for this week only, when we feel that irresistible urge to blog, we’ll treat blogging like we do (sigh) exercise: we’ll just lie down until the feeling goes away.

But, the Prime Directive of Blogging reads: Thou Shalt Blog Daily! So shalt we.

There’s most read, and then there’s favorite. This is a post which yr (justifiably) humble svt is, regrettably, but not regretfully, not at all humble about.

Blast from the Past!

A post we really, really loved to write, and read, and re-read…

From our very earliest days, originally posted July 14, 2007.

mm067: By the way, I do earn a living!

I realize that it has been some time since I broached the topic of my career, and what I do to afford the leisure to pursue this blogging thing. Lot’s of Bloomberg here; just not in this post, sorry!

Faithful reader will remember that what I do is web conferencing, an increasingly useful tool that should be adopted by more and more corporate entities due to its transformative capabilities.

My employer in the Heart of Corporate America (HCA) is a grand old conservative organization, proud of its financial performance measured over generations (a quarterly dividend paid without interruption since before my late father was born!). It seldom moves quickly where infrastructure technology is concerned, rightfully (I admit with admiration and affection that I have come to see it as rightfully) expending whatever fleet instincts it possesses towards the tooth of its tiger, not its tail.

Which is a long explanation for the fact that HCA has only been using web conferencing for a few years, mainly the five-plus years that I have been there. That’s an interesting tale. I found myself “at liberty” after my previous employer, having entered into a “merger of equals” disappeared utterly, as far as most of its human capital is concerned.

I had been part of a vigorous corporate information technology department of 155 people, getting real work done, largely supporting a marketing organization that had just launched a blockbuster product. Our “partners” swept in shortly after the “merger,” and told us there were jobs for each and every one. 1,000 miles away. Five of us took them up on their kind offer; the rest of us took a severance package.

So there I was, with a lengthy résumé, but not much current IT experience, but what was current was useful: Documentum, a complex but growing document management system, and Lotus Notes, the collaboration environment beloved of many large corporations for its rock-solid email system as well as its rapid database development feature.

The Documentum piece got me a 4-month consulting gig at HCA, doomed to frustration as the hiring manager, whose vision had created the opening I filled, cheerfully moved onward and upward (and to another campus) about a week after I reported for duty.

After a two-month interval, I was interviewed for a business analyst position by another team in the same division, and what got me the consulting gig, six months long but renewed several times, was tucked away on page two of the position description: experience with telephone and video conferencing.

I had that experience. Our Documentum team at my previous employer had outposts in several cities in the US and Europe, and, while I didn’t create the bi-weekly telephone conferences (and the occasional video conference) that the head of the corporate team had established, I did a great deal of the heavy lifting there: I published the invitations, agendas, prompt minutes; and led most of the meetings with a relaxed and welcoming style that created esprit de corps among people who had never met. We weathered the Y2K circus with ease, thanks to the cooperation and collaborative successes engendered in those bi-weekly (in 1999, weekly) sessions.

Yes, I could talk the talk about conferencing. And almost immediately after I started, additional to the conventional Lotus Notes business analysis work I had been assigned, I was asked to go see the division’s key contact for a web conferencing pilot then underway, using Lotus’ product called Sametime. The manager in question said, “thanks for coming over. Have a seat at my desk. Here is hard copy of the presentation. We’re about to demonstrate the tool in a web conference. Why don’t you lead it?”

With that sudden immersion, I never looked back. Indeed, I have led countless demonstrations since (with a good deal more assurance than that first, sweaty session). I have taught over 3,000 students the tool, all using the technology to teach the technology, in order to provide tactile, experiential learning, key for adult learners. I have surveys from 130 of the most recent of those classes, going back nearly 18 months, and my composite score is 4+ on a 1-5 scale. I facilitate key meetings, remotely from my desk as well as on location in offices and conference rooms on-site and offsite. And yes, both my corporate email signature, and my business card contain the title, “Mr. Sametime.”

My passion for collaboration created a niche for me in HCA, and by the way, has led to significant cost savings. Using IBM Lotus methodology for an analysis earlier this year, I made a believable case for $5 million in travel avoided last year; a number I think is conservative. HCA has over 60,000 employees in 130 nations around the world. Imagine not having to fly 16 regional managers from Latin America to Miami for training just as effectively delivered and received in one’s office! Just eliminating cross-campus and cross-county travel to meetings large and small in and around Corporate HQ must provide hundreds of hours of productivity savings daily.

Finally, I try to keep my passion pure, as it were. Yesterday, I was asked to participate in a bi-weekly telephone conference with a group of field-based high powered advance-degree technical managers, as there were questions about the web conferencing tool they were concerned about. The upshot? I cheerfully directed them to a third-party outside resource. Yes, a more expensive solution than my in-house one. But in their field application, the outside resource is, I believe, the more effective answer. As I told them, just because I have a (most wonderful) hammer, not every client’s problem is a nail.

Finally, I did apply for my soon to retire manager’s position, as I previously reported I would. And, as is their wont, HR never communicated one word to me beyond the automated receipt of the on-line application (don’t you dare call us — we’ll call you).

I’m not management material at HCA, that is obvious, and of course I’m disappointed, but as I said previously, I do love what I do, and where I do it. Some would ask: why on earth would you screw that up by moving into bean-counting-obsessed management?

Why, indeed.

Thanks for indulging me.

It’s it for now. Thanks,

–MUDGE