Research Project

FACTORS INFLUENCING THE USE OF ICT AS A TRAVEL ALTERNATIVE FOR BUSINESS TRAVEL

NHTV Breda University, The Netherlands Haaga Helia University, Finland

University of Pretoria, South Africa

Research Project

Total # of respondents : 58 (= corporate travel managers from multinational corporations)

– Finland 17

– The Netherlands 27

– South Africa 14

26. How could the use of virtual meeting tools be developed in your company?

• it is in a good development phase

• We are satisfied with our equipment

• should be mandated in some cases

• Tools are fine but culture needs to be developed further.

• More education.

• We plan to update the meeting software.

• Video meetings outside our own company network.

• More videoconf. equipment to more sites

• implementing a better video tool

• no idea. they all like to meet the others. everything is there but we still like to travel.

• communication, show cases (roadshow), involvement of the Travel Managament Company

• (good) news travels fast

• We are a videoconference service supplier. We develop the services and have many international customers. We have both desktop videoconferencing (personal use) and group videoconferencing in use. We can use them at home or when travelling. This enables distance working. I don´t know how we could develop the tools further in our company. We are in a very good situation now.

26. How could the use of virtual meeting tools be developed in your company? (cont’d)

• It is already common tool

• By taking also other tools in use than videoconference.(eg.Microsoft Office Live meeting etc)

• Virtual meeting sbehind your own desk, insted of using VCrooms only

• already in process

• We should educate people about facts and figures. Besides that support of budget holders and management is necessary.

• more devices in different countries

• Promoting the availability and organise training for employees for which this is new

• Change the travel policy and create cost awareness within the company

• expanding existing facilities

• Internal promotion

• It has already been fully implemented worldwide and used very much. Employees are well aware.

• Need to see it working first, our business still relies more on face to face meeting and more often than not we need to be on site to offer assistance etc...

• strict enforcement

• We are currently investigating further use of our IP networks to provide PC to PC video calls. We may roll out further VC centres to more branch and regional offices.

26. How could the use of virtual meeting tools be developed in your company? (cont’d)

• The technology needs to be in place and supportive of seemless virtual meetings by staff. Once that is in place the offering of the technology should be surveyed among staff, customers and other stakeholders and based on those findings communicated and training.

• get technology that actually works. extremely poor quality; dropped lines; just some of the frustrations always blamed on poor bandwidth. If there is no video, people just mute the call and continue with other work until they hear their name. it has been useless to try and get colleagues to work together. it is great for regions to report monthly to the CEO

• mandatory review before international meeting travel approval

• Greater information and training

• The hardware for videoconferencing could be upgraded, as it has been in place for approximately 10 years

• I think it could be used extensively in our company and that a lot of cost saving will be able to take place when it comes to using another tool instead of travel time.

• Virtual meetings from your personal desktop or laptop

• not sure, we have very good facilities with occasional technical connection problems

• It will open a whole new range of opportunities to grow, engage with relations

• Virtual meetings could be used more for forums between our local offices as well as between our Head Office and the Middle East office, and some of our European partners. A lot of our work is site based (construction) so this could not be replaced by Virtual meetings. We need to promote the advantages virtual meetings via our internal communication, for example Intranet, Company Magazine. As cost saving is our priority this can also be communicated via email to our Travel Bookers.