Anonymous

South

Consultant

It's about culture and attitude, not technology.
Forget about being "green" - think about simply using time and money effectively. Thousands of hours are wasted every year on travel time, let alone the additional costs. Reclaiming that should be the objective. "Greenness" is a fashionable and politically correct fringe benefit.

The problem is not technology. The means for everything from individual desktop conferencing to multi group conferencing has been around for years.

Making it happen requires change in attitude and work culture on such a scale that it can ONLY come from the top - by example. The first step has to be for senior execs to change their behaviour and make that change visible to their staff. This is probably the most common and most difficult thing to achieve. I suspect strongly that it is a mixture of ingrained habit (massive travel is the macho thing senior/important people do), lack of understanding and fear of technology

That has to be followed by an intensive (and probably protracted) programme of education and change management across a complete organisation. It IS a 3-5 year programme to make such new behaviours routine. People forget that it once took that kind of action "just" to put e-mail in place!

By the way, this links perfectly with the "working from home" discussion going on elsewhere. Simple person to person video conferencing (as part of an instant messaging solution) can go a long way to linking a distributed workforce.