Saving the Planet One Meeting at a Time

by Jack Cashill

Mike Jarchow (rhymes with Darko), Oak Park High School class of 1969, and I have at least two things in common. One is that we both know the upside of Kansas City life and the downside of California’s.

 

Jarchow lives in the East Bay suburb of Danville. As it happens, I did my C-SPAN Book-TV presentation on What’s The Matter With California, at a swell Danville country club.

This California confluence has shaped our thinking on the second thing we have in common—video. Jarchow, the West Coast Director of Sales for Omnipresence, a Boston-based global A/V integrator, reigns as the proverbial guru of a phenomenon best known by the clunky and inadequate 20th century moniker, “video conferencing.”

As to myself, I have been producing videos for the last 20 years and have been dabbling for some time in a complementary phenomenon known by the only marginally less clunky moniker, “video streaming.”

Although neither of us has ever lost a night’s sleep fretting about melting glaciers or drowning polar bears, both of us have seen clearly what a stinking, sputtering mess California highways are, Jarchow more intimately than I. However insensitive we may be to Mother Gaia, neither of us likes to suck carbon monoxide in the Caldecott Tunnel or send our hard-earned petrodollars to some multiple wife-beating Mideast oil sheik.

Jarchow happily has a solution, and I have spent enough time jacking with video to recognize it. He calls it simply and exploitatively, “Digital Green.”

Explaining Digital Green
There is no mystery here. Digital Green technologies mean that unless you are doing something real—like, say, laying sewer pipe or busting crack houses—you don’t have to be anyplace anymore.

Digital Green technologies create a virtual workplace by transporting audio and visual images electronically to and among specific and narrowly targeted audiences. The betterknown Digital Green formats include video conferencing, web conferencing, narrowcasting, web casting, and even Blackberrying. Video streaming is not always targeted, but it falls under this general rubric.

What amazes Jarchow is that not everyone is using this technology all the time, especially when one considers that more than 25 percent of U.S. mid-market companies have at least 10 locations, many of which are outside the United States.

Contemporary uses go well beyond the obvious. Telemedicine in its many forms may be the most important. Law firms are beginning to use the technology for deposition-taking among other functions. In this multicultural age, many public and Mike Jarchow (rhymes with Darko), Oak Park High School class of 1969, and I have at least two things in common. One is that we both know the upside of Kansas City life and the downside of California’s. Saving the Planet One Meeting at a Time private entities use tele-interpreters, including deaf signers. Universities have been holding online courses for a decade and are beginning to figure out how to do them visually and well.

Terrorists, alas, have also caught on. I don’t know if this is a recommendation or not, but Yasser Arafat employed this technology in his bunker. Digital Green is that safe, secure and efficient.

And then, of course, there is telecommuting. In California, more and more, hotshot, high-tech kids demand flex hours and the tools to operate remotely, and their employers have little choice but to oblige. In Kansas City, I know at least a few high-tech companies that do the same.

Telecommuting is no longer a big deal. Digital Green can facilitate meetings at the speed of light in multiple locations, not just around the metro but around the world. Now, it can do so in commercial broadcast quality and in high definition to boot.

Not too long ago, Digital Green technologies were sufficiently expensive and complex to limit their use to large global enterprises. No longer. The price points today are such than just about any non-Amish business can have a significant and fully affordable telepresence.

Green Shame
For all of its obvious advantages, Digital Green technology has faced widespread resistance. One reason is that historically the technology has been artlessly packaged, badly marketed, poorly deployed, and thoroughly misunderstood. This is not exactly the way to start a revolution.

Perhaps even more critical is that old territorial thing—control. Managers like to have their staff on site, under their thumb. Control also shapes the customer-vendor relationship, the doctor- patient relationship, the student teacher relationship, and the attorneyclient relationship.

As a case in point, back in the late 1990s, the dotcom revolution so squeezed office capacity in Silicon Valley that SBC in San Ramon set up many of its staff as telecommuters. When the bubble burst, and office space opened up, the company discontinued telecommuting. This had much more to do with control and open cubicles than it did with performance. Now, the 8,000-car parking lot is routinely full.

It gets stupider. The same company had a video conferencing team of which Jarchow was a part. He would often be summoned to the home office for no larger purpose than to watch a Power- Point presentation with 200 or so other disgruntled telecommuters, each of whom had to negotiate rush hour madness in his own car. Jarchow calls this, “Not eating your own dog food.”

Jarchow’s strategy for breaking such counterproductive corporate habits is the wonderfully trendy gambit of shame, green shame. “How dare you, SBC. You are destroying the planet.” Exploitative or not, Digital Green technology deserves its new name. The technology leaves an amoeba-size carbon footprint, presuming, of course, that amoebas have feet.

Better still, Digital Green causes no collateral damage the way other green solutions do. Unlike wind, it kills no birds, not even the dumb ones. Unlike nuclear, it attracts no elderly hippie protestors. Unlike ethanol, it causes (or is accused of causing) no tortilla riots in Mexico City. Unlike solar, no illegals driven north by tortilla riots fall off the roof installing it.

Digital Green does its thing out of sight. Better still, it keeps our sorry behinds out of airports and off the highways—except, of course, to those destinations where face-to-face contact is essential like, say, Paris in April or Antigua in January. There need be, however, no more flights to Waco, no more drives to Wichita.

Everyone reading this column has already had to smile through enough oppressive in-house lectures on how some concocted green technology is “good for the bottom line,” however head-scratchingly counter-intuitive the technology seems. Well, this one actually is good for the bottom line.

Each trip avoided by using Digital Green technology has a direct, measurable reduction not only on an organization’s carbon footprint, but also on the ROI. The average business trip runs $1,500 in costs. The average Digital Green transmission costs about $2 in electricity. In short, the Digital Green solution is total win-win. It is fully and unequivocally good for the economy, good for the ecology, and even good for the family—at least for those who like to spend time with spouse and kiddies.

So why aren’t we all talking about Digital Green? Well, that brings us to the third and most serious limitation on its growth to date. Unlike many green schemes, this one does not empower the government to control our lives.

And for our eco-warriors and their allies in the media, control is the real bottomline.

 

Jack Cashill is Ingram's Executive Editor and has been affiliated with the magazine for 28 years. He can be reached at jackcashill@yahoo.com. The views expressed in this column are the writer's own and do not necessarily reflect those of Ingram's Magazine.