According to a study commissioned by Verizon, 91% of professionals admit to daydreaming in meetings, 95% say they miss all or part of meetings, almost 75% say they bring other work to meetings and almost 40% say they have actually dozed off during a meeting. Yet in the same survey, people say the number of meetings is increasing. Is there a better way?
In a recent article, Mark Lorion, Head of Marketing for Spotfire, suggests that data visualization and business intelligence tools can help create a new kind of meeting – the dynamic meeting. At this meeting attendees can explore information together, share different perspectives and collaborate to create a solution. The dynamic meeting can be a faster way to arrive at the right solution than today’s iterative process of presenting a point of view with PowerPoint slides, gathering feedback, revising the slides and calling another meeting to review them. It also makes meetings more interesting, engaging and meaningful for participants. @mark_lorion also tweeted during a recent Forrester Twitter Chat on Advanced Analytics: “Business decisions are made in discussions and meetings, and advanced analytics needs to be fast and easy to use so people can have conversations around data.”
As technology enables real-time data analytics and enterprises put analytical and data visualization tools in the hands of end users, the need for Social BI and real-time decision making will increase. As more and more of those decisions require input from multiple stakeholders, the dynamic meeting (a much faster and efficient meeting solution) will overtake the more traditional, Dilbert-style meeting.
