1. I've always touted the value of capturing these "water cooler conversations". I wouldn't have compared it to video conferencing. It's like saying "Lee Majors is looking better than William Shatner".
My general experience, having equal access to video conferencing and teleconferencing, is that very few people bother to go through the effort of video conferencing. And compared with Second Life, teleconferencing still wins. Right now, predominantly in my company, for confidentiality reasons. The only Second Life meetings I participate in for work are Second Life related. You end up with a whole bunch of avatars sitting there doing nothing while we all talk on the phone.
Or, more often, a bunch of avatars conducting side conversations about what is going on in the teleconference over IM. :-) But we do that with normal IM and teleconferences anyway.
I do get a great benefit by capturing the "water cooler conversations" for the non-Work meetings I do. But my time, and my colleagues times, are sufficiently tightly scheduled at work that we all have to run off anyway.
So I think it is going in good directions, and there are benefits there, but it's not the killer app for Second Life yet.
JC

Posted at 10:20AM on Oct 29th 2007 by Jaymin Carthage

2. Suncorp-Metway is my own bank. Nice to see that they're SL-aware.

Posted at 10:41AM on Oct 29th 2007 by Tateru Nino

3. I remember my first teleconference — the year was 1999 or so. We were excited about the fantastic technology breakthrough that would allow us to talk directly to people overseas "at the same time", and drooled over when those disembodied voices started hissing, cracking, and sputtering through the microphone. The meeting did last 30 or 40 minutes or so, with everybody on our side very very excited. Nobody could understand who was talking and what they were saying, but that was really a minor issue — the *joy* and *fun* of being able to talk to people across the world and do a meeting together on the phone was way more important and/or impressive than what actually happened.

Relieved, near the end, someone said: "Ok, I'll send over the minutes by email. Bye all, take care." And ultimately that's what was *really* important, from the point of view of our hard-working team: the email with the minutes.

There was another similar issue even further back in time — my first business trip over a thousand miles, where you had actually to pack a suitcase and catch a plane. We met people that we knew only by name. I was asked to present a summary of the work done on that meat-and-flesh meeting, to justify the costs. I thought it would be too sarcastic to write: "we exchanged business cards with our email addresses". In fact, thanks to that exchange of email addresses, after two weeks, the project (involving an European network which was not connected or related to the Internet yet) got a huge push when people started to email each other, and, well, got the ball rolling, so to speak. We accomplished in a few weeks what usually took several months of in-the-flesh meetings. At that time we didn't really think a lot about why.

Fast-forward to the year 2000. Swamped over with meetings, conference calls, phone calls, and similar meatspace communications, I announced a new policy: from now on, people were forbidden to get in touch with me in the mornings, since I had to actually get some work done. They could, however, send me emails and instant messages. The phone would be off during the mornings. They could waste all my time in the afternoons, however. The sales department cried havoc, claiming that a lot of "emergency meetings" might be deemed necessary, and this would seriously impact the whole company, but, stubborn as I am, I remained adamant. People had to adapt; I couldn't afford to waste my precious time in useless meetings (which, in any case, would always get a short email afterwards with the minutes...).

They adapted. In fact, customers found out that I would answer their IMs and emails outside business hours. Sometimes they even got free technical support or consultancy tips at odd hours, like Christmas evening or New Year's Day. They certainly got much quicker responses from me — instead of frustration of never being able to squeeze a meeting in my tight schedules.

I remember an organisation I was part of that had a physical HQ since 1996 but where all board members, lacking time for volunteering work, settled all issues and assigned tasks via email. Seven years later, someone wrote that we were in fact a completely virtual organisation and that they never realised it until all of a sudden the word started to have a meaning in the late stage of the dot-com bubble. It was only 'natural' that super-busy people that can't afford to waste time need an alternative method to communicate — and teleconferences waste the same amount of time than a meatspace meeting, with a difference: no commuting costs!

Well, to make the story short... this became sort of my own personal corporate culture, which I bring to every company I happen to work with. I got used to it. It was clear to me that sales reps will always need to look up their customers in the eye in order to get their sales pitch rolling — so they will always insist on in-the-flesh meetings. But the rest of the world doesn't really need it.

Teleconferencing is touted as the best thing since sliced bread for dealing with meetings, but that's not true. No matter how much time you spare (because you're not travelling to a meeting), you can still only pay attention to one meeting at the same time. On the other hand, with a bit of an effort, you can easily attend to 5 or 6 different IM-based meetings at the same time, and still answer emails — or that "urgent" phone call from your boss.

For some people, time is the ultimate resource of your organisation. While a good sales rep will be able to do 6-7 meetings a day, in the flesh or on the phone — thus efficiently making good use of their time — someone relying on Internet communications can easily use the same amount of time to deal with 30 or 40 different people. Perhaps even a hundred. Only call centre operators are able to deal with that amount of contacts (assuming that each call takes an average of 3 minutes) during a shift (usually four hours), but they're trained to read answers from scripts.

Bottom line: no, I'm not convinced that teleconferences or videoconferences seriously promote a more efficient workplace. They certainly help by cutting the commuting costs. But the change is not dramatic, ie. it's not an *order of magnitude* more efficient.

Internet communications are :)

And, well, so far, SL is the best example leading in that direction. Alas, I can only present anedoctal evidence. But the day someone asks me for my opinion to buy a videoconferencing unit, I'll tell them that their money would be much wisely spent on handing out laptops that can run SL efficiently, and show them some Excel tables with some interesting numbers on productivity :)

Posted at 4:56PM on Oct 29th 2007 by Gwyneth Llewelyn

4. Sometime it applies but sometimes isnt.no, I'm not convinced that teleconferences or Live Video Conferencing seriously promote a more efficient workplace

Posted at 1:45AM on Jan 8th 2008 by Mark