Among the projects I am working on recently, one of them is deploying video conference solutions in Intel. Video conference has been gaining a lot of attention recently here. When I was talking to the CIO of a large organization in Hong Kong a few weeks ago, video conference was also a topics that came up in the conversation.

From what I have heard and seen, there seems to be a increase interest in this subject. There are three factors I believe are driving this. One is the impact of the current economy, which drives down travel budget. Video conference is a lower cost alternative to meet people when one cannot be physically there. The second factor is the increased focus in sustainability. By replacing travel will video conference, one can reduce the carbon footprint of the organization. The third factor is probably the advance of video conference technology. The systems have been getting better in terms of performance and cost. Many of them have gotten much more user friendly and Support more usage models. Some of them also work reasonably well on a laptop PC.

In Intel IT, we have a program that is trying to make video conference capabilities pervasive to our employees. We have deployed some high end solutions in a number of large sites during last year. We are going to deploy some middle tier and lower tier solutions during the rest of this year. We see these video solutions will bring benefits in areas of travel reduction, sustainability, employee productivity, enablement of new business models, and enhancing collaboration.

A simple survey for the pilot users of a table top solution confirmed that the video conference capability had increased team collaboration comparing to audio only meetings and increased engagement from remote participants. The survey also revealed that some tips and tricks needed to be advertised to use the solution effectively, although the system might appear intuitive to use.

How are you using video conference solutions in your organization? Do you have any experience and best know methods to share?

Hello again, it has been a very long time since my last external post. Sorry about that! I have plenty of excuses as to why, just none that are worthy of expressing. I was sitting down the other day, reviewing some of my industry RSS feeds, reviewing a few tweets for those I follow and spent time reflecting on my team's work in collaboration space for our internal Intel employees.

Industry experts, analysts and somethat say they are experts - point out their "right answers" to collaboration (which are blogs, wikis, social networks to name a few). Makes me stop and wonder, are those folks looking back at history of collaborative tools? Or are they focusing their energy on "the shiny new thing." Let's look back for a moment - do we think that collaborative tools are something new? (they really are not). Look at the past improvement attempts, like email. Here at Intel email is still the big collaborative tool. Would we say that was a success? If so, why improve it? It definitely has filled a gap for quite sometime. Many folks still use it - a lot (just go on vacation for a week and don't check your email to see how much). Some folks have move to Intelpedia (our internal wiki) for posting content. Intel's wiki use has taken off over the past 2 to 3 years. Maybe five years from now - we might look at wiki's in the same vein as email. What is next up? How will we feel about that one in ten years? We are being challenged to deliver new collaborative capabilities - which to me are solving the same set of problems that have been around for quite awhile (with a few new issues added).

While it's important to avoid locking ourselves in the past, or letting the past bias our view of current or emerging tools, it is extremely important not to forget the history of collaborative tools and the complex problems those tools attempted to address. The Web 2.0 vendors need to really look long and hard at those problems and use cases - rather than shining up something new (that meets some of needs). I come across challenges everyday when speaking to many Intel users and teams. When I attempt to get a better understanding of the problems that they are telling me, they point to a solution that they have seen. Some shined up version of something that could work, maybe.

Shiny objects always get someone's attention. We ran into a recent challenge around micro blogging at Intel. Many Intel folks are on Twitter (sbell09 for me) and this is great for external stuff. The questions comes down to, "Am I sharing something externally that I should not?" That question started internal use of Yammer - for the Intel group only. Grew to over 400 users. Many folks saw some value, others not but it all comes down to what you put in. A variation of the Twitter question was asked, "Is Intel IP secure?" Yammer is externally hosted. Someone pointed to why don't we just set it up internally within the firewall? That very weekend someone did just that.

We must not forget that these new technologies are not perfect. We must also not forget that the individual behavior changes that will come with these tools - is going to be a big change. That change must come with improvements to getting work done, quickly and securely.

What challenges do you face? Do you folks remember history? Do they care? How do we stay ahead?

In my blog inside Intel I'm exploring some ideas for social media implementation, and would like to throw them out here to the IT Community for input. Our social media implementation is a bit patchwork at the moment, so I'm looking at ways to help fill it in. In this case, the idea is to open up our current method of corporate employee communication.

Currently, our intranet is a fairly static site. Most news and articles are just fixed web posts, and what I've been exploring is adding an open discussion area on the end of every article published on any intranet site. Then any reader who has something to ask or add on a topic can contribute. It may be a simple link to related material, or it may be detailed thoughts on the topic. There may be no comments for an FYI about a local road closure, or a lengthy exchange about some of our product strategies. If the topic draws out a reader who cares enough to add thoughts, the net result of those inputs creates material that is more valuable than the post alone. At worst it shows what people think of a topic, and at best there could be ideas, information, and discourse that adds a lot more than the original post.

The second piece of this change would be to allow employees to directly submit their own articles and material, similar to something you might see on del.icio.us or Digg. Those sites are very different, but together they enable every single employee to quickly share content they find valuable, and provide a mechanism for the best of that content to rise up for all to see. It's a staggering difference from the tops-down, management sanitized communication we get today. It leverages the incredible knowledge and brainpower already present across Intel, and starts building a valuable repository of information that no centralized, "tops down" organized project could accomplish.

Perhaps it gets to the heart of an ongoing debate about the role of IT - are we an enabler for existing technical demand, or do we have an obligation to stretch the rest of the company in new behavorial directions around technology? I'm a believer in the latter, but it's far from a settled issue.

Do any of you allow that sort of deep participation in all levels of employee communications? Is your company even one that would allow it? As I work this issue internally, I'd really like to hear how others address it.