Justin Lauder (ABS) and Darren Belford (IBM) are presenting on how the Australian Bureau of Statistics are using Polycom visual conferencing equipment in their environment. Some notes:

1. At the ABS over the past 14 months, have been doing a large project on visual social communications – essentially Sametime integrated with boardroom systems.

2. The ABS – the official national statistics agency. 3200 staff, with 700 field data collectors. Can grow to 40,000 temp staff during a census. 9 offices located in all capital cities across Australia.
– business strategy – to decentralize staff across Australia (so as to attract better qualified staff across a larger geographical footprint, rather than been limited to the head office in Canberra). Lots of virtual teams. Travel budgets are reduced.
– use lots of IBM tools – Lotus Notes, Sametime (including Sametime Gateway), Connections 3, Cisco Phone System, 31 video conferencing rooms (are very hard to schedule; are constantly used).
– thus the boardroom booking system has been very successful; but something more was needed to do high utilization / poor availability.
– solution – integrate desktop collaboration and Polycom.

3. Business goals:
– improve quality of remote meetings.
– ease collaboration across virtual teams, eg., time zones, getting access to virtual teams.
– reduce annual spend on travel.
– get away from one hour being the default meeting duration; new cultural norm for having the meeting for as long or short as you needed it.

4. There was a very strong communications campaign built around the release of desktop video conferencing, such as wall posters.

5. Technically, …
– two integration points between Sametime and Polycom. Right-click in Sametime, choose “Video Call.” And calling endpoints directly – for ongoing persistent meetings.
– support for Cisco phones, tablets, 1 800 from a smartphone, and from video conferencing rooms.

6. Benefits:
– … the right information, the right time
– … discovery and knowledge growth of employees.
– … social and real time
– … ease of escalation