one of the academic journal search emails i receive from proquest (or something), pointed me towards an article entitled ‘Firms Tap Virtual Work Spaces to Ease Collaboration, Debate Among Scattered Employees’ by Jessica Marquez originally published in Workforce in May (22nd) 2006.

google turned up this bizarre link for the full article (i have NO CLUE why the url is ‘remodeling’ and why this article ended up there). it’s a good article though – full of examples of companies using virtual work and the savings they have encountered. a few highlights:

• the FAA began using real time (ie chat) meeting rooms with shared document facilities b/c debating rulings via email and phone caused 18-24 month delays in getting information sorted – including critical safety details! the article quotes the FAA as saying rulings make it out the door in a year tops & they have saved U$3.7mil in travel expenses plus U$2 mil in employee time. the yearly cost of the software is $U1 mil.
• a gartner report is quoted as saying companies are turning more to virtual team software b/c they are more comfy working virtually and there have been advances in the technology. it’s unclear if these numbers are from the same gartner report or elsewhere – virtual teaming software licences are projected to be U$800mil this year (2006) and U$1.4 bil in 2009.
• a city gov’t in nevada with 800 employees was using email as primary communication (sounds like both internally and externally) which allowed issues to linger, get ignored & be debated endlessly. by converting to software which sorts issues by topic, keeps history of the conversation and sends them reminders of outstanding issues, they have increased efficiency 15%.