In the current debate about the environmental situation we are in, many
organizations are trying to decrease their climate effect. One way can be
to reduce the amount of travels by increasing the usage of distance
meetings.
Other advantages distance technology brings are the cost and time savings
that comes when the employees of the organization do not have to travel.
There are no flight tickets, hotels or other travel expenses. The staff is
more effective since they do not have to spend time waiting after checking
in at the airport and they do not have to wait for their luggage or get
stuck in a traffic jam to or from the airport.
With all of these advantages one would think that most organizations would
be willing to use this technology. This is however not the case. The usage
today varies between heavy users to reluctant users.
In an attempt to find differences between heavy and light users of distance
technology four out of 12 county councils in Sweden have been studied. In
each of the county councils two interviews have been performed, one with
the management and one with an average user of distance technology. The
interviews showed that there are only a few things that differ between the
frequent users and the less frequent users. One of the significant
differences are the availability of support, the heavy users have easy
access to support in case the user experiences problems whereas the light
users have trouble to get assistance. The education of the users are
another thing that are different between the groups, the organizations with
high usage have well educated users at the same time as the light users are
less educated on the usage of the technology. When looking at the process
of setting up a distance meeting there are differences between the groups,
the high users have a process that is similar to the process of setting up
a regular meeting, the light users have a more complex process when using
distance technology compared to regular meetings. The last difference is
when distance meetings are considered to be...
