In reply to Garvan Long.

Good questions. Gathering data is painful work. Our UC/V service management team had to go into CUCM10, and into the WebEx system, to set up data collection. And summarising it all was a lot of manual DB sorting. That's why you rarely see usage data collected from IT organisations - its so costly.

And productivity is even harder to measure. Personal productivity is measurable only when you do the same exact task twice, under different scenarios (e.g. with video and without video). And when does this happen?
You can use surveys, but that's not very reliable.

Its not difficult to show that good video services reduce travel costs (by over 2/3 at Cisco). We can even show that our Sales people were more effective when using TelePresence than not (by logging sales use of TP with customers (manually) and linking that to size and speed of sale (delay between meeting and order, in SFdC - semi-manually). Turns out order size was unconnected, but time to order was reduced, compared to all other sales.

Personally, its my opinion that building new teams, and dealing with people in stretch circumstances, is a lot more productive face to face. And that video, really good video, is almost as good.

I also think that, even though Cisco claimed to be "global" for a long time, but it was only after we'd deployed TelePresence (late 2006, but it only got well used by early/mid 2008) that we started to see really effective, global teams. Teams with people from multiple locations. Before that, most teams were still made up of people in the same building, plus a few unfortunates at the other end of a conference call.

Today I get to work in teams with some of the best people at Cisco, in the Americas, and in Europe (I'm in the UK), and in Asia. We use video a LOT - to get connected and stay connected.

(However, I have to add that without teleworking, working across big time zone gaps wouldn't work well no matter how good the video is. I'm not going to get into the office for a meeting at 7AM for China, or stay past 8PM for meetings with California. But I don't mind doing that sometimes as long as I'm home, sitting on my comfy couch.