“Necessity is the mother of invention”

This old saying was again demonstrated when the Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano erupted under a glacier, turning  the ice explosively to steam. This shattered the molten lava into the fine dust that stopped northern European air traffic for most of a week. Air travel is usually regarded as “essential” but as soon as it had to stop, alternative arrangements were made.

This time it was different compared with other stoppages in recent decades when air travel has been severely restricted, because of the significant developments in Virtual Meeting technology.  Examples include Webex, Web Office or GoToMeeting.  Even the European Union transport ministers had to use virtual meeting technology to hold their conference to decide what steps to take.

This demonstrates that evolution often takes place under pressure.  Without a complete ban on flying, the ministers would almost certainly followed their normal methods and travelled from the four corners for a face to face meeting.  Now they are also talking about accelerating the merging of nearly thirty national air-spaces into a single European Airspace, to improve the management of future similar travel disruption.

Business Continuity Planning for Virtual Meeting Processes

Happily the technology for virtual meetings is widely available so Business Continuity Planning should focus on:

• Changes to how people work (“business process re-engineering“). A Virtual Teamwork approach can save a lot of time travel and result in taking decisions sooner, which increases the business tempo while reducing the effort. How people work is key, not the technology itself.
• Making sure that everyone understands the changes to the ways of working (supported by training). Reluctance to change results in unwilling participants finding lots of reasons for sticking to the old methods.
• Making sure that the systems work technically.  Yes the technology exists, but it needs to be tested in use.  For example
  • business travellers may find that their Internet access is poor.  I stayed recently in a business hotel in Switzerland where the only way to get WiFi access was to lie on the floor near the bedroom door, because of poor positioning of the antenna in the corridor.  Not an ideal way to hold confidential business meetings!
  • multiple e-mails are often needed to set up the time for a simple meeting, even when using polling software with time zone correction, such as Doodle or Timebridge. The start of summer time/ daylight saving time is different for North America and Europe, so the problem arises twice at both the beginning and end of the summer.

Most of us find risk, continuity or contingency planning to be less urgent than current commitments, but the developments of virtual meeting technology should make it much easier and the payback more immediate. In big companies this is built in to the IT services, but there are plenty of inter-organisation situations where ad hoc solutions are worth using, because they can be set up rapidly and accessed via the web:

• Industry and professional associations involving members in different companies.
• New Consortia during the early stages of formation.
• Mergers involving companies with very different IT infrastructures, such as consultancy firms or banks.
• Task groups charged with industry-wide assignments, such as registration of use of chemicals.
• EU Project proposals
• Clinical Trials for pharmaceutical companies
• etc.

Please add to this list based on your experience where virtual meetings replace or supplement face to face events. What benefits did you get?