Students

New attitudes, technology paint a brighter future for videoconferencing

Videoconferencing has been touted as a practical, here-today technology that can save companies from having to fly employees all over. But despite its practicality, adoption of this technology has been minimal. Advances in audio and visual technology, and a sea change in attitudes about communication may change all that. Harvey Shrednick and Ajay Vinze, both information systems professors at the W. P. Carey School of Business, believe that after years of unfulfilled hype the time may finally be right for videoconferencing.

2008-01-02

For decades, videoconferencing has occupied an uncomfortable existence between science-fiction and reality. On one hand, it has provided many a futuristic rendezvous in comic books and "Star Trek" episodes. On the other hand, it has been touted as a practical, here-today technology that can save companies from having to fly employees all over. Despite its Space Age sexiness and fiscal commonsense, adoption of videoconferencing has been far from commonplace. After all, most of us talk on the phone every day without getting wistful over the absence of video. The disinterest in videoconferencing has stemmed from two factors. First, the technology hasn't been adequate to make it a good proxy for being somewhere else. Second, users who have grown up without being saturated with technology have been generally content with one-dimensional communication (i.e. audio-only phone or visual-only e-mail) when in-person meetings aren't possible — despite the fact that more than 60 percent of communication is non-verbal. Because both technology and attitudes about communication are changing, Harvey Shrednick and Ajay Vinze, both information systems professors at the W. P. Carey School of Business, believe that — after years of unfulfilled hype — the time may finally be right for videoconferencing. New technology For less than $100, you can buy a webcam and, in a few minutes, have your own do-it-yourself videoconference with someone on the other side of the world. But as anyone who's ever tried to hold a conversation over a web cam knows, the sound and picture are imperfect and no one is ever fooled into thinking the two parties are not separated by time and space. While significantly more expensive and advanced videoconferencing systems offer markedly improved experiences, they also fall short when compared to hopping on a plane and meeting in the same room. That is almost not the case with Cisco's new audio-video meeting solution, says Shrednick. Dubbed TelePresence Meeting, Cisco promises that the technology package will "make you look and sound just like you do in person." For about $300,000 per installation, it should. The improved experience and hefty price tag are the result of bringing today's top audio-video technologies to bear on videoconferencing. The company that has declared its motto to be "The Network is the Platform," is betting that customers are willing to pay dearly for a conferencing system that gives the illusion of putting far-flung people in the same room. As Cisco sees it, "despite their relatively low cost traditional video systems sit dormant and dusty in conference rooms around the world." Today they go unused for much the same reasons that people told market researchers they didn't like AT&T's Picturephone demonstration at the 1964 World's Fair: the equipment was too bulky, the controls too unfriendly and the picture too small. "While videoconferencing is a long way improved from the early days, adoption and usage rates show that it is still underutilized and unappealing to the average user. In a nutshell, when you have a video conference, it still feels like you are talking to a video conference system," says John Orton, a unified communications specialist at Cisco who's been involved in videoconference technologies for the last ten years. TelePresence delivers very high-quality audio and high-definition video at low latency in a specially-tuned meeting environment. It includes 65-inch plasma screens with 1080p resolution and CD-like spatial audio as well as special furniture, speakers, microphones and lighting. The result is life-size images of meeting participants shown in the same warts-and-all visual clarity of the Super Bowl telecast; sound comes from the person who is speaking, making for an immersive meeting environment. "It is a tremendous way to not only save travel but also, possibly, to speed up decision making," says Shrednick, who implemented a videoconferencing system when he was working at Corning Incorporated a decade ago as Chief Information Officer. However, despite the promise of the system, Shrednick says, "It was sort of stilted. It really wasn't lifelike. It really wasn't effectively networked the video, the audio, just wasn't there." By contrast, Vinze says that with TelePresence, "you can see a sweat bead on someone's forehead" which "really gives you a sense of a real presence." "What you've done is now is you've added in subtle richness that otherwise will be constrained by the physical limitations of the media you are using," says Vinze who has been studying technology-enabled meetings since the early 1980s. New attitudes Over the past 50 years as both the telephone and television came to become ubiquitous parts of daily life, videoconferencing technologies also improved. In 1956, AT&T built its first Picturephone test system, which broadcast a single image every two seconds. With eight years of tinkering, the system still got a thumbs-down from users in 1964 and AT&T spent another six years in the lab. When the company launched commercial Picturephone service in 1970, Ma Bell's executives predicted that a million units would be in use by 1980. The estimate was exceedingly overly optimistic. But in the nearly three decades since the year that AT&T predicted the Picturephone would go mainstream, technology itself has become increasingly interwoven with daily life. Baby Boomers have lived through an era where computers moved from hulking behemoths that took up entire rooms to personal computers; they saw the spread of TVs (and color at that) and telephones including the first bulky, brick-sized mobile phones. Boomers have seen such technology as part of life; in their eyes, a computer or television, like a stove or refrigerator, is an appliance that sits somewhere and does something, says Vinze. On the other hand, younger people and certainly today's teenagers see technology as an active, inseparable part of everyday activities; many have never known a time when phones weren't mobile and media wasn't multi; not only are they comfortable with a convergence of audio and video, they expect it. Indeed, Forrester Research's 2006 North American Consumer Technology Adoption Study found that 18- to 26-year-olds known as 'Gen Y' in the United States and Canada are integrating technology into their daily lives at a faster rate than any other generation. Further, the study found that the younger Gen Y-ers spent 28 percent more time online every week versus 27- to 40-year-old Gen X-ers and almost twice as long as 51- to 61-year-old Boomers. Those in the 18-26 bracket were 50 percent more likely than Gen Xers to send instant messages, twice as likely to read blogs, and three times as likely to use social networking sites. "A lot of people, as you can see by the social networking that's taking place and the craze of YouTube and Facebook and all these new social networking technologies that the younger people have gotten together, they've gotten more used to visualization and video than my generation. That's how they do business: they want to see people," says Shrednick who spent 33 years with three Fortune 500 companies before beginning his teaching career. The receptivity of a new generation to technology, combined with highly advanced audio, video and networking technology could be a perfect storm in favor of videoconference adoption. The implications of a videoconferenced world But predicting the adoption of videoconferencing is tricky. It is difficult to say that the technology will catch on simply because the pieces seem to be in place. With so much hype and so many great expectations around videoconferencing over the years, there seems to be a general ennui about yet another new offering. (Not coincidentally, Cisco's TelePresence product makes pains to be labeled something other than simple videoconferencing.) The disinterest will fade when videoconferencing hits a tipping point, when A/V conferences begin to approach the normalcy of turning on a television, sitting down at a personal computer, writing e-mail or making a cell phone call. We tend to look only at the more quantitative measures of adoption: how many units sold, market penetration, etc. In a similar vein, those selling such systems tend to focus on the solid ROI metrics that might add up to a sale: the hours and dollars saved multiplied per each employee who doesn't have to catch a flight to make an important meeting. But, says Vinze, rather than focus on the hard-and-fast of such adoption, businesses must also pay attention to the more important, albeit less tangible implications that come with a technology-enabled shift. In watching and waiting for a tipping point (Will this be the videoconferencing solution that breaks through and wins broad adoption?), Vinze says we lose sight of the fact that each new development like TelePresence is a step along a continuum. It is not a question as to whether videoconferencing or video phones will become an everyday part of life but rather when. Like instant messaging, the number of new users is only part of the story. The other part, says Vinze, is the effect that these new technologies have on interpersonal communications and corporate culture. And the life that a technology takes on can be vastly different from its first incarnation or from the features-and-benefits marketing brochure. Instant messaging was first seen as a senseless time-wasting application for teenagers — so much so that many companies blocked IM on their networks. Yet less than a decade after going mainstream in one form, instant messaging has vastly changed how employees communicate, how customers interact with company representatives (note the number of companies that offer technical support via IM now) and even how families coordinate during a day. Similarly, videoconferencing may take on a very different life in the future as the technologies that make it feasible become commonplace and increasingly affordable. With that eventual widespread access and adoption (be it 10 years from now or 50) will come new cultural norms and inevitable clashes and misunderstandings. It is akin to the cultural shift from suit-and-tie to Casual Fridays to everyday business casual. While older workers may feel that it is imperative to meet a business partner or sign a big contract in person, younger employees may shrug off the transcontinental flight in favor of a high-definition handshake. Where suppliers used to grimace over a stingy new contract on the phone, they will increasingly not be able to hide their emotions from buyers or vice versa. And whereas junior employees might never meet with important but distant partners — having been left home while executives jetted off to faraway meetings — now they can walk down the hall and reach out to these people. If e-mail and texting have turbocharged the pace and nature of business, what will widespread videoconferencing mean? And if its no-need-to-travel promise comes true, what will that mean for airports and airlines? Cisco has installed more than 150 TelePresence suites at its own offices with about 240 locations planned for the initial rollout. Cisco is convinced of the systems' utility and Orton says that the company's "return on investment is extremely positive." So is this the solution that will change blas attitudes about videoconferencing? In a sense, Vinze says it doesn't matter. We are not strangers to the debates that revolve around how new technologies affect us and society as a whole. However, we are more accustomed to those debates being about nuclear energy and cloning rather than more pedestrian efficiency solutions for the workplace. But it's not always clear where big social changes will come from. "People fixate on the wrong thing. When e-mail came about, you could say that you could get quicker responses. But that's not really what it is," says Vinze. "What it did was change the nature of interaction, which changes the way you do business. So this (videoconferencing) is just another of those things. It's like when cars became popular in the early 1900s. The thing isn't that the cars became important but it caused the suburbanization of the United States. This is an innovation that causes disruption in the organizational mindset." Bottom line

• More than 60 percent of communication is non-verbal.
• In 1956, AT&T built its first Picturephone test system, which broadcast a single image every two seconds.
• Generation Y (18 to 26-year olds) spent 28 percent more time online every week versus 27- to 40-year-old Gen X-ers, and almost twice as long as 51- to 61-year-old Boomers.
• The receptivity of a new generation to technology, combined with highly advanced audio, video and networking technology could be a perfect storm in favor of videoconference adoption.
• Businesses need to pay attention to the more important, albeit less tangible implications that come with a technology-enabled shift.

KnowIT