Meeting of Minds

Computerworld - Ronald Berman had a dilemma: He supervised managers all over the country but found traveling for group meetings to be an expensive inconvenience. "The travel was killing me, and I thought there must be a better way to meet," he says.
So about five years ago, he tried using phone lines and a shared electronic whiteboard to connect 10 people as they hammered out a compensation spreadsheet.
Berman found that a process that used to take hours of discussion in person was whittled down to one hour -- without the time and expense of traveling.
He says the shared application helped everyone focus on the task at hand in a way that doesn't always happen in a conference room. And "everyone sees what's being done, so you build trust up rapidly," he says.
"Like e-mail, it changed the communication path," says Berman, now first vice president of virtual technologies and curriculum development at Countrywide Financial Corp., a financial services company in Calabasas, Calif.
Berman has achieved what many managers only dream of: an effective, efficient virtual meeting.
Experts say that businesspeople -- IT leaders included -- generally don't run productive meetings. They allow participants to get bogged down in unfocused discussions or sidetracked checking e-mails on handheld devices. And those problems grow exponentially when meetings aren't face to face.
But in the increasingly global economy, companies can't tolerate that kind of inefficiency anymore. To get work done, teams often need to connect virtually, and the pressure is on to do it right.
"You have to try much harder in a virtual meeting," says Naomi Karten, principal at Karten Associates, a consulting firm in Randolph, Mass.
Running a virtual meeting takes preparation, special skills to ensure that all participants are engaged and an understanding that technology should facilitate -- not overpower -- the meeting's agenda.
"The technology needs to fade into the background," says Dan Rickard, Calgary, Alberta-based director of customer solutions at Elluminate Inc., a provider of collaboration software.
Prep Work
Preparation for a good virtual meeting begins well before it starts. At VA Software Corp. in Fremont, Calif., workers send out agendas and supporting materials 24 to 48 hours in advance, and Chief Technology Officer Colin Bodell expects meeting participants to read them. "The more preparation work we do, the more efficient the call," he says.
Berman holds practice sessions to ensure success. "If the presenter doing the meeting isn't comfortable, people know it, and typically the meetings don't run very well," he says. So the first time someone