Knowledge Management Case Study

VENTANA: Help at hand for those who recoil from meetings

Anyone who has fidgeted, snoozed or doodled frustratedly through meetings - and there can be few in business who have not - would welcome the chance to make them shorter or abolish them.

But while many meetings take too long, are subject to rambling discussions or end inconclusively, it is hard to do without them. Technology can, however, help to ensure that the accumulated knowledge of those attending meetings is channelled swiftly in the right direction.

Ten years ago, a company was set up in the US to offer solutions aimed at cutting through the fog of argument, uncertainty and indecision in meetings and making them far more productive. Today, Arizona-based Ventana has corporate, military, academic and government clients across the globe.

Since meetings generally have a goal, it is important that the assembled knowledge is used to best effect. Ventana's GroupSystems suite of team-based decision support and software tools - based on academic research into the way people behave, think and collaborate - is designed to cut out the time-wasting and ego posturing that blights many meetings.

"I was 15 years in a business environment and the biggest waste of time was meetings," says Clive Holtham, who is professor of information management at the City University Business School in London.

He is now an enthusiastic advocate of electronic meetings, which the business school uses for internal research planning, as part of its management training courses and in executive education. "It's more than a technology - it's a way of working differently," he says of the Ventana products. "You could say it's a way of re-engineering meetings."

People in GroupSystems-enabled meetings generally work with laptops linked in a local area network. Usually, participants sit in the same room, though they can be in different locations. An agenda appears on the screen and ideas are keyed in anonymously.

The assembled views and data can be analysed on the spot, organised into categories and voted upon. Results can be viewed at once in chart and table form.

Users of GroupSystems have recorded impressive savings. In the US, Chevron Pipe Line put a team on to analysing procurement services and found the electronic meeting method enabled this to be done in half the time of a traditional meeting. It saved about $5m a year.

Eastman Chemical halved the time needed for brainstorming and problem solving sessions with GroupSystems. After buying its first licence to use the system, it calculated a yearly saving of more than $500,000 for 12 people.

Yet whatever the benefits, it is not always easy to encourage new users. There are considerable cultural obstacles against introducing technology into meetings.

Bob Dudley, head of operational review at National Grid, the UK electricity transmission company, says implementation of GroupSystems requires a culture change.

"In traditional meetings, people's contributions are filtered, depending on the role of the individual.

"In GroupSystems-enabled meetings, you're dealing with the inherent merit of the ideas. Because it's anonymous, the relationship between the person and the idea is broken. It can come as a shock."

National Grid uses the system to support risk management, its business excellence programme (involving quality reviews and suggestions) and the gathering of information for audit work. Mr Dudley stresses the importance of both technical and facilitation skills.

When National Grid sets up an electronic meeting, two specialists are on hand. One handles the technology, while the facilitator takes people through the agenda, canvasses opinions and assesses the results - all electronically.

"The structure and output of the meeting must be thought about beforehand," Mr Dudley says. While the technology speeds up the meeting, the quality of the result is heavily dependent on the facilitator's skills.

In Mr Holtham's view, GroupSystems works best when participants are broadly agreed on the objectives. "It won't work if there is immense conflict in the group. There has to be a certain measure of common agreement."

A few years ago, a common source of resistance was the fact that some executives were "keyboard illiterate". This is no longer the case.

"Now, the resistance is more from the fact that those who are fantastic in face-to-face meetings can be hostile to something that potentially democratises the meeting. This can upset the traditional politics of the meeting."

Andrew Fisher, Financial Times, October 13, 2000  (Source)