NGA, or next-generation internet access, could soon become the fluid in which all your business applications – in all parts of your business – swim.
Senior staff, sales teams and marketing teams, in particular, can make the most of videoconferencing – which can allow you to conduct virtual “face-to-face” meetings with partners, clients, suppliers or even senior staff in other parts of the country. That could save you not only money and time on travel – but it will also be good for the carbon footprint of your business.
“Many people who have experienced remote participation [in meetings] don't feel they are in the same room, participating on the same terms as those who are physically present – but this barrier is being overcome with newer systems,” says Sebastien Lahtinen, co-founder of the broadband advice website thinkbroadband.com.
“When immersive video conferences become just as easy and universal as making a telephone call or sending an e-mail, they will have the desired effect of reducing the carbon footprint – as people prefer to avoid the hassles and costs of travel.” The latest systems, he says – with their multi-display, high-definition screens – make it seem as if you are in the same room.
So sales and marketing teams, multi-site offices and businesses with global customers could see perhaps the biggest benefits of all.
But it would also be possible to send potential clients rich media presentations – such as video “walk-throughs” of what your business can do – at a push of a button, perhaps as part of customer relationship management (CRM) software application.
If you’re the sort of entrepreneur who likes to maintain a blog as part of your internal or external communications, to help keep that conversation going with staff or customers or stakeholders in your business, then it would make it easy to upload high-definition podcasts or videos to it on the fly. That could help make your website more like a dynamic, virtual showroom, and less like a static, digital brochure – though it would depend on your target users having high-speed internet access too.
Human resources teams, too, could see staff spending less time out of the office, as they increasingly download video materials and use live videoconferencing for their training needs.
Whatever your operations team is working on, collaborative computer-aided design tools will make it easy to allow all the team members involved – engineers, designers, writers, photographers, architects, or whoever’s doing the work – to upload progressive versions of their work, from any location, until the project is complete. Best of all, the project manager always has a snapshot of what has been done and what has not.
Your back-room teams could also see improvements in the way they work. Many businesses, for example, are choosing business software that is delivered on demand online – as part of the trend toward “cloud” computing – which allows them to download and upload records via the internet rather than keeping them on local servers. NGA will make that process quicker – whether it’s supply chain management, customer relationship management, your compliance systems or your company accounts.
And if you’re the IT manager, you’ll co-ordinate all this in the knowledge that you’ve as much bandwidth as you’re likely to need – which could also be useful when you come to do your backups. Handy, that.