Reducing IT Costs Through Collaboration

As of 2016, the global web and video meetings market was valued at $6.4 billion, and by 2023, that value is expected to hit $13.4 billion. This exponential growth in volume is accompanied by many challenges, including how to equip IT departments with the tools they need to manage these growing, global networks. IT is constantly seeking smarter tools that ensure high quality service and reliability so they can operate efficiently and at the lowest cost possible. As you look to reduce IT costs associated with collaboration, it is critical to deploy technologies that support not just the quantity, but the quality of the demand within your organization. 

More Meetings, New Challenges

Studies show that most business professionals spend 60 hours per month—40 percent of their time!—in meetings. The problem for IT is that many meeting rooms are not utilized efficiently or even accurately. In fact, 73 percent of companies have no data at all about how their meeting rooms are being scheduled or used. This results in sizable waste as IT teams scramble to put out technical fires and avoid underutilization and inefficiencies.

IT must be aware of several key challenges to efficient meeting spaces:

Ghost Meetings – These rooms are booked but go unused for many different reasons. It is essential to reclaim these spaces and add them back to the inventory so they can be optimally used.

Zombie Meetings – These are similar to ghost meetings except they are scheduled indefinitely and never attended. These often occur when the scheduler leaves the company. Large companies with industry-standard employee turnover can have thousands of zombie meetings each week.

Room Squatters – Room squatters treat a meeting room like their private office, either using it without a reservation or overstaying long past the end of a meeting. 

Underutilized Rooms –  There is a trend toward shorter meetings, but by default, most employees book meetings for an hour. Additionally, many book spaces that are larger than needed, leaving chairs unoccupied. This underutilization proves costly over time.

The Right Info, Right When It’s Needed

To maximize the ROI of your collaboration spaces, implement tools that provide answers to critical questions. 

IT must know:

• The most and least frequently booked rooms
• How many no-show and ghost meetings occur each week
• How these empty rooms be released automatically
• How many “Zombie” meetings are in the calendaring system
• If the number of attendees is aligned with the size of the meeting space
• Which technologies and applications in meeting spaces are most-used
• Which meeting times are the busiest

When IT is armed with this critical information, they are able to make informed decisions about how spaces are used, which technologies to invest in, and even the best times to schedule repairs. To get there, your IT team needs tools that provide them with insights they can act on immediately. These insights provide visibility across complex video and voice environments, reduce the time required to diagnose and fix issues, and help improve adoption rates across the organization. Through this approach, your company will improve IT efficiency and lower costs associated with maintaining your collaboration network.

Choosing a Solution That Fits Your Needs

When choosing a solution, be sure to partner with forward-thinking technology providers that offer a full view of how their technology is being used. Your solution should provide:

Room Booking Visibility – Optimization software that integrates with your calendaring systems to track meeting booking behavior and room utilization

Room Occupancy Data – Software that captures people count metrics from video endpoints and supports collection of occupancy data from built-in sensors in the room to accurately reflect room utilization

Room Technology Usage – Vendor-diagnostic platform that tracks usage of room technology, including endpoints, phones, and room displays to maximize the return on investment

Now is the time to take advantage of emerging insights technology to give your IT team the tools they need to reduce costs and optimize your collaboration network. To learn more about how Vyopta does all this and more, take the guided tour.