O These tools span a wide range of meeting assistance and support tasks. At the O low end, software schedulers keep track of people, appointments, and resources L to coordinate meeting times and places. In the middle are tools which help L groups by improving communications. This includes conferencing systems and M bulletin board packages, which extend "meeting space" outside of the meeting S room by letting participants discuss issues without having to sit together. Other O mid-range tools are designed to assist communications during a meeting. Video M and audio conferencing hardware can be integrated with personal computers to S link people in diverse locations for a single meeting. Shared drawing and editing K tools also help groups work on a single document or share a visual concept easily.
Q At the high end are systems with much loftier goals: the complete reinvention of I the meeting process. Developers of these systems have developed ways of J completely changing the way meetings are held, and they have numbers from J customers proving massive and dramatic improvements in productivity. But N these benefits come at a cost---attendees must stop thinking of meetings as a Q waste of time and start thinking of meetings as an opportunity to make decisions and share information.
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K In evaluating group scheduling systems, network managers must keep in mind R the underlying politics of scheduling. These are generally more important to the T success of a group scheduler than quality of user interface or performance. If the N group scheduler cannot successfully emulate peopleÕs behavior regarding their I own personal calendar, then it will not be accepted into the workplace. O Groupware of this type must fit into the organization; it is not reasonable to E expect people to change the way they operate simply to accomodate an appointment scheduling program.
P In the table below, group schedulers which support at least three platforms are & listed along with contact information
- Table *
Q The oldest alternative to face-to-face meetings is computer conferencing systems O (sometimes called bulletin boards, although purists make a distinction between O the two). These conferencing systems grew out of multi-user systems and often : support both microcomputer and dumb terminal interfaces.
N Most conferencing systems do little more than let people exchange information N and follow a single message and its associated discussion. The largest multi-K platform conferencing system of this type is the Usenet News system. With L literally dozens of public-domain and commercial "news readers," and a good P selection of minicomputer-based servers, a simple conferencing system can truly K encompass all corporate computing platforms, including dumb terminals, all C microcomputer systems, on up to X window system terminals. Other G commercial products which support multiple platforms include Digital's L (800/DIGITAL) DEC Notes, Lotus' (800/522-6752) Notes, and Pacer Software's (800/722-3702) PacerForum.
H Lotus Notes is one of the few products which can be extended to include Q additional group conferencing facilities, such as voting on issues, surveys, and N anonymity. Conferencing systems with these facilities built-in are found in H research projects more than commercial products, such as the New Jersey H Institute of TechnologyÕs EIES (Electronic Information Exchange System) conferencing system.
K The computer-equivalent of an audio-conference or video-conference is also P available. Although some tools aim to replace face-to-face meetings with group S type-fests, only certain narrowly defined meetings will benefit from these tools. N Because typing is so slow compared with talking, a traditional audio or video P conference is much more cost-effective than asking meeting participants to type G in their comments and thoughts rather than simply speaking them. Eden I Systems Corp's (800/779-6338) The Meeting Room does replace face-to-face L meetings, but supplements them with audio-conferencing capabilities, either G through a PC-based software/hardware combination or via a normal audio conference.
L Group editing and drawing tools fill a different niche. These are meant to N supplement face-to-face meetings or audio conferences by letting participants O share a single view of a document or a picture. Group Logic's (800/476-8781) P Aspects is a Mac-only version of this which lets networked systems share in the J tasks of editing documents and pictures. Their Mac and Windows product, Q Whiteboard, gives cross-platform compatibility at a price---only shared drawings K are supported. A variation on this theme is available from Farallon, Inc K (510/814-5000) in their Timbuktu package, which lets Windows and Mac users 8 share the same screen and look at the same documents.
N GroupSystems isn't a single package. It's actually a suite of software tools N (sixteen in the DOS version, fewer in the Windows version) which automate and H enhance many of the processes which occur in meetings. A meeting using E GroupSystems requires a personal computer for each participant and a N "facilitator," someone to lead the meeting and choose which GroupSystems tool * is most appropriate to the task at hand.
M For example, suppose you want to have a meeting to help decide on a new name Q for your company. In the GroupSystems world, the meeting would look like this. O First, participants in the meeting would brainstorm ideas using the Electronic N Brainstorming tool. Each participant would enter as many ideas as they could P think of during a defined time period, say 10 minutes. As ideas were typed in, M GroupSystems would shuffle them around and send them to other participants. G By seeing the ideas of others, presumably, youÕd come up with your own possibilities.
B GroupSystems advocates claim two advantages over manual meetings: L participants can type in more ideas more quickly than anyone could possibly K write them down because everyone is typing at the same time. Each idea is S evaluated on its own merits, rather than based on who said it. Because tools like J Electronic Brainstorming are anonymous, people who are normally afraid to U bring up opinions in a meeting will be able to bring their best ideas without fear. ? In most professional meetings, this anonymity is rarely abused.
I Once brainstorming was over, the facilitator would use another tool, the P Categorizer, to put ideas into different buckets based on group opinion. Since I brainstorming would likely have generated hundreds of ideas, it would be J important to narrow them down into broad categories, such as "favorites," A "maybes," and "disliked." In this phase, normal discussion would prevail---F except the process of sorting the ideas would be assisted by computer.
I Finally, participants would be asked to vote on the ideas. GroupSystems R supports seven different kinds of voting. In this example, participants might be J asked to rank their top ten favorite ideas. GroupSystems would tally the M anonymous votes present totals on a screen in the front of the room. Before N anyone left the one-hour meeting, the top ten names chosen by the group would < be available for further research and final decision-making.
O Bringing in GroupSystems is not a trivial investment. GroupSystems requires a K PC in front of each user, Windows or DOS, a LAN (any popular microcomputer M LAN package will work) to link them together, and a facilitator's station to S control the meeting tools. GroupSystems also uses a shared screen at the front of I the room which has to be large enough for everyone to see. With a base P software and training cost of $25,000, building a meeting room for GroupSystems usually costs about $100,000.
R GroupSystems doesnÕt require a dedicated room. In theory, it's possible to bring L together a bunch of laptop PCs with network cards, stick an LCD panel on an D overhead projector, and hold a GroupSystems-assisted meeting. Most K companies, though, decide to allocate a space where GroupSystems is always P available. If anyone can use the meeting room at any time, the reasoning goes, 1 we'll maximize use of the equipment and software.
Q With that kind of price tag, ROI (Return on Investment) is a big question. When O will GroupSystems pay off its high capital costs? Nunamaker has that licked. O Over a dozen PhD theses at Universities in the US and Europe have been written M looking at one aspect or another of GroupSystems, showing where it works and J where it doesn't. Almost all of them found substantial benefits to using GroupSystems in meetings.
B Ask Ventana, and they'll pull out studies showing a payoff almost P instantaneously. The Army claims that they saved at least $150,000 in a single G session, completing a month-long project in a single week. Go to the O GroupSystems User's Group meeting (the sixth annual one will be in Tucson this O March), and you can see Ford, Bellcore, Chevron, Finnair, Coopers and Lybrand, I the NSA, IBM, the World Bank, Unisys, Cigna, along with the Army and the J Marines explain how they used GroupSystems to hold better meetings, reach - consensus faster, and make quality decisions.
B GroupSystems has always focused on the meeting process itself. A E GroupSystems meeting can generate prodigous amounts of information. O Unfortunately, there is little continuity from one meeting to the next and few N tools to save the output of a meeting into the corporate memory. Ventana now G ships tools to import and export information from Lotus Notes, but the K conceptual ties between between what happens in a meeting and what happens F between meetings are not part of the GroupSystems model. Although a N GroupSystems "session" can extend over many physical meetings, the process of L integrating GroupSystems into a larger computer-assisted decision-making or design effort is not defined.
G Nevertheless, GroupSystems has converts from all over the globe. Many I organizations are moving from individual management to team management. L When this happens, efficient meetings become crucial to the success of the M organization itself. Ventana's GroupSystems has become an accepted part of ' corporate culture at hundreds of sites.
I While GroupSystems works for large sites with deep pockets, schedulers, H electronic mail, and conferencing systems can work in even the smallest N companies. The idea is the same everywhere: spend less time making decisions and more time implementing them.
Joel Snyder C is a Senior Analyst for Opus One (Tucson, Arizona). His PhD, from K the University of Arizona, had nothing to do with GroupSystems. He can be G reached at 602-324-0494 or via email to jms@Opus1.COM.
