A r c h i v e d I n f o r m a t i o n
Welcome to the Age of the 'Virtual' Meeting
From the Desk of CIO Craig Luigart
Welcome to the age of the no-hassle, no-travel, ?virtual? meeting! Soon Department employees who work on one side of the country will be able to meet face-to-face with employees on the other side of the country?without ever having to leave their office buildings.
This feat will be possible due to the addition of videoteleconferencing (VTC) capabilities?throughout the Department by the end of this fiscal year. VTC allows a group in one location to see and hear the members of a group in a different location.
Participants in virtual meetings will meet by going to the nearest VTC center. There, images and sound of the meeting participants in one VTC center will be transmitted to video monitors and speakers in a second VTC center. In addition, each center will have a special video camera that can automatically focus on the person who is speaking. The pictures and sound will be clear and transmitted in near-full time (almost instantly).
The most obvious advantages of these virtual meetings are that many employees will be able to avoid the hassle of travel and that the Department will avert some travel costs. In addition, people in the virtual meetings will be able to make quicker decisions because more of the meeting's expected participants will be able to attend and because there will be no delays caused by travel. Communication also can improve because everyone in the meetings will hear the same information at the same time.
In addition, by using VTC, job candidates from other parts of the country could be interviewed more easily, which might in turn lead to a more diverse work force. The process of reviewing grant programs with others from across the country also would be more convenient.
The Department's VTC technology will meet international standards for VTC. This means that, eventually, groups from ED will be able to have vitual meetings with groups from other agencies and even from other countries.
Initially, there will be one VTC center in each region and several in the headquarters area. The key to making the centers succeed will be to ensure that each center is connected to DS3 lines, which have enough bandwidth to carry the enormous amounts of information involved with video, voice and data transmission. The goals, which depend on budget availability, are to complete the centers and install DS3 lines in every region by the end of the fiscal year. The DS3 lines will carry up to 45 million bits per second compared with the current T1 lines, which carry 1.5 million bits per second.
