Collaboration Turbo-charges Business Brainstorming
Cisco WebEx provides ideal platform for online mind-mapping to slash time and cost of collaborative problem-solving
Industry: ITES
Location: Asia, Europe and America
Company Size: 3000
Challenge:
- Transform business model for proven strategic business software tool
- Enable direct, hands-on facilitation without travel or physical meetings
- Bring in multiple participants from any location, using any connected device
Solution:
- Cisco WebEx collaborative platform enables powerful pre-sales demos
- WebEx online desktop-sharing via multiple devices with live audio and video
- Easy access to conference recordings for quick linkage to mind maps
Results:
- WebEx reach and scalability support global business model
- Average travel-related cost avoidance for meeting of people
- 100 percent sales conversion success rate from Cisco WebEx sales presentations
Review
Challange
A global procurement and supply chain consulting powerhouse? Leader in direct and indirect procurement software? Best-of-breed provider of managed procurement services? Fact is, we are all of these and more. The customer offers the perfect blend of strategic and advisory services, pace-setting technology and managed services, with a laser focus on procurement and supply chain transformation to help clients achieve their business goals.
The customer needed a solution that would enable him to meet several challenges. The first challenge was to scale up capacity to serve a larger customer base, and cut out the need for costly, time-consuming travel, both for himself and his customers. The second challenge was to reach a potentially global market, enabling corporate collaborations across multiple time zones and geographies.
The third challenge was to find an effective way to sell his service directly to top executives with the power to sign off expenditure, such as chief executive officers (CXOs), but who typically have little time to spend on promotional literature or listening to sales pitches.
Importantly, the solution would have to enable the customer to replicate the live interaction and rapid exchange of ideas among a group of people meeting in person, but without their having to be physically present. This requirement meant that, as well as being able to shape and follow a collaborative mind-map developing in real time, participants should have the option to see as well as hear one another.
The customer was already familiar with Cisco WebEx® and saw in the online platform the answer to his needs.
Solution
The solution facilitated the customer process enables an exceptionally rapid and clear group definition of business problems, breaking them down into their component parts, seeing the cross-linkages quickly, and moving on to an agreed solution in which each group member knows exactly what actions they need to take and when. Thereafter, management of the plan can be tracked swiftly and effectively by regular Cisco® WebEx-based progress meetings.
The customer has a range of effective tools to propel the mind-mapping process, from “disruptive” thinking through consensus-modeling and prioritization, to the assignment of individual tasks and timescales and determination of success metrics.
It enables participants to harness their collective brainpower and drill down quickly to specifics, then manage implementation of an agreed plan through to completion.
Cisco WebEx enables the customer software suite to be operated virtually, sweeping away the traditional clutter of Post-It notes and flip-charts. It requires no software download to corporate operating systems or end-user devices, and can be accessed not only from desktops and laptops but also wirelessly, on smartphones, tablets, or PDAs.
The Cisco WebEx platform is “device-agnostic,” allowing participants to join wherever they may be, and contribute as fully to discussions as if they were in their offices. It also enables groups of people, located together physically in conference rooms, to join through network nodes and interact with the planning process via a digital display screen.
Cisco WebEx offers a virtual environment in which each step of the process can be initiated, on cue, by a skilled facilitator. One key to its success is WebEx’s easy-to- use desktop sharing capability, coupled with the capacity to hand control of material shared to any participant, and type in mind-map text entries directly from their keyboards. “What WebEx allows you to do is to connect up brainpower at any time,” says Senior Member of IT.
Video can be added using webcams, showing participants’ faces as screen thumbnails, which is a preferred option for some customer’s internal clients. WebEx also integrates smoothly with advanced Cisco TelePresence® technology to combine mind-mapping with a truly lifelike communication experience. The customer can thus run fully immersive sessions, or blend Telepresence with WebEx. And sessions can be recorded for future reference on the WebEx digital audio function, or saved “live” within the mind mapping software and sent on to participants as slide-packs or maps.
“Video allows people to see the whites of the eyes and assess how someone is reacting within the group,” says Senior Member of IT. “WebEx enables the process to happen, and you can then enhance it with video capability. Immersing it into a TelePresence room pretty much stops organizations from having to travel, ever.”
The scalability and flexibility of Cisco WebEx allow customer’s clients to participate in meetings in a variety of ways. For example, one group of people might be sitting together in a conference room, engaging with the process over a digital projector, with others connected over Cisco TelePresence, and others collaborating via WebEx from their desktop computers.
Even if video is not included, Cisco WebEx offers an easy way for participants to see who is speaking by displaying a telephone transmission logo onscreen next to the speaker’s name, which is especially useful when people have not met before. Ease of scheduling by WebEx email invitations is another plus. Accepted invitations automatically integrate conference dates into e-calendars, with built-in adjustment for time-zone variations.
Results
The customer says that by using WebEx, he can achieve in one day results that would take five times as long to accomplish by traditional means. He says this is the same as if he attends a mind-mapping session in person and talks executives through the process face-to-face. The key advantages of using Cisco WebEx, for him and his customers, include avoiding the disruption, inconvenience, lost time, and cost of travel.
These advantages multiply when the customer group is large, or made up of very busy senior executives based in distant parts of the world. During a global banking merger, for instance, the customer connected 23 senior executives across three continents to work out a new architecture to guard against money-laundering and fraud.
The ease of collaboration achieved on Cisco WebEx means planning can be a continuous process of fine-tuning and review, replacing the old corporate routine of holding one grand meeting at lengthy intervals, and helping executives to maintain focus.
The customer’s service enables customers quickly to reach any chosen level of granularity, which is especially useful as business strategy and tactics become more closely entwined. Much the same applies to the customer progress tracking. The customer has clients who “block-book” 100 hours of review sessions and draw them down when required.
For the customer, Cisco WebEx is highly effective in helping to win new business from prospects all over the world. He writes, by hand, to top executives in target companies, offering a 15-minute session to demonstrate the customer over WebEx. That gets him a 70 percent response rate, but the conversion rate once people experience online is 100 percent.
