Networked Collaboration: Profound Benefits Possible but Still a Work in Progress

September 24, 2008

by Charles Waltner

BDO Seidman LLP, a Chicago-based firm providing financial services and business consulting, epitomizes the modern "distributed" company. With nearly 3,000 employees scattered throughout 35 offices in the United States, BDO Seidman can use all the help it can get in bringing its organization closer together.

This issue came to the forefront in 2001 when the firm began centralizing and standardizing its operations. It quickly realized it needed a new, more cost-effective way to train its far-flung workforce.

It found an answer with Cisco WebEx. BDO Seidman selected the collaboration software company's training applications to help educate its employees on the many new procedures and software programs being introduced as part of the reorganization, says MaryEm Musser, national director of training and development for the company.

She says use of WebEx's multimedia collaboration tools saved her company millions of dollars in travel costs and greatly streamlined its training logistics. Since then the company has adopted many of WebEx's offerings, using its multimedia team workspaces and "town hall" Web meetings applications to help employees share information and communicate more easily.

As for technical challenges, BDO Seidman has encountered few issues with the hosted service. "Ease of use is very high," Musser says.

Little things help. The company, for example, was able to integrate WebEx with its corporate intranet to create a one-time sign-on to both systems.

WebEx's pay-as-you-go model has also been a boon to her company, Musser says. Many other online education or IT offerings require an annual contract, locking businesses into a fixed amount of services and fees. "With WebEx we were able to use it as our needs changed," she says.

But it is early days for multimedia collaboration and Web 2.0 communications. Musser as well as technology experts recommend companies identify a specific operational issue and start with a small test project. "Don't be too aggressive," says Zeus Kerravala, a senior analyst for Yankee Group Research. "The tools are there but companies need to learn how to best use this technology. That will take time."

Cisco also emphasizes that such technology investments require a commensurate change in business processes to provide best results. Indeed, that is a lesson gleaned by BDO Seidman.

Musser says the biggest challenge for her organization has been in getting employees to think differently about how to run a networked meeting. "It's not the same as face-to-face," she says. "You have to plan to do things differently in virtual environments. People need time to learn how to interact and get comfortable with the technology."

BBDO Seidman provides the WebEx collaboration suite to all employees as part of their "toolkits," which include office phones and computers. But it doesn't force any one type of communication on employees, since needs and sensibilities vary widely among different types of employees and even among a similar group of employees, Musser says. Despite the light touch in implementing the Web 2.0 communications tools, the collaboration platform has steadily built up a fan club. "Employees are stingy with their time. But if it saves time, they'll use it," she says.

Still, networked collaboration is a work in progress at BDO Seidman. For example, the poster-child for Web 2.0 - video-based communications - has so far taken a backseat at the firm, partly because of technical issues but also because everyone is still trying to figure out the best ways to use it, Musser says. In one case, virtual teams found out that they should point a Web camera at a conference room whiteboard rather than at the people in the room. "That was where the important action was taking place," she says.

BDO Seidman is not alone as it explores new ways to communicate. A recent global survey of business executives by management consultancy McKinsey and Co. found that the use of Web 2.0 tools is now "intense and wide-ranging," and companies that have successfully experimented with these applications are shifting to using them more broadly. But the report also indicates some struggles, with only 21 percent of companies expressing overall satisfaction with their Web 2.0 investments.

Despite these challenges, Kerravala says Web 2.0 innovations are creating a new era in businesses communications. "The days of the phone and email are coming to an end."

But BDO Seidman's experience with WebEx illustrates just how much more there is to know about Web 2.0. "We've still got lots of exploration to do," Musser says. "There are plenty of possibilities. It's just a question of learning all the ways to use it."

Charles Waltner is a freelance writer in Piedmont, Calif.