Social Skills
Johansen says he's also astonished at people's amazing willingness to share their knowledge -- and how fast they respond. He puts it down to people being fundamentally social creatures who love to engage with others who share their interests.
Beca has an internal CAD "community of interest", similar to Facebook except closed to outsiders, which is intensely engaged with this type of online problem-solving and social engagement, he says.
While Beca's embrace of social networking is developing slowly and organically, the company is much further advanced in its use of modern IP-based video-conferencing.
The latter has had a tough start, with resistance from those who can recall the clunky, pricey 1990s' ISDN-based video-conferencing systems.
But today's technology is very inexpensive, and set-up is so simple you can almost be spontaneous, says Johansen. Beca uses Tandberg's 1700 MXP technology, which offers high-definition video and runs on a widescreen PC-style screen. He rates both audio and video quality -- and it doesn't require huge bandwidth, he says. Setting the equipment to 384kbit/s allows Beca to run three to four video-conferences at a time.
Johansen says the company is pretty green -- he mentions in-house worm farms -- and video-conferencing makes a big impact on Beca's carbon footprint, by cutting back on air travel.
It also helps the company deal with the cultural and languages issues. Johansen cites the example of a young Singapore engineer who struggled with audio-conferences but is fully engaged with video-conferencing.
"English is his second language and I think he subconsciously lip-reads... Suddenly, he can read the body language; he can lip-read, and this transforms the way he can interact... [before] there would be no response."
Because Beca runs virtual teams, video-conferencing helps greatly here -- a job can be physically located in the Middle-East but require design input from Christchurch, Singapore and Australia.
The company is now starting to mix its Tandberg solution with unified communications. This involves integrating Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS) with Tandberg; one person can use the OCS webcam to talk to others who are using the Tandberg equipment.
OCS is good for one-to-one and one-to-many communication, but you need a proper Tandberg-type set-up for many-to-many, says Johansen.
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