The benefits of videoconferencing go beyond saving time, cost and bringing down risk as well as carbon emissions. According to Gagan Verma – Head Government Business, Polycom India, “Visual communication brings about a lot of discipline in the workforce.”
The technology has been used for Telejustice in China, citizen engagement in India, disaster preparedness in USA and emergency responses in Russia. It facilitates a citizen-centric approach, encouraging public-private partnerships.
The Department of Income Tax has 70 regions that are connected by videoconferencing. In a vast country like India, it is not possible to travel everywhere. By enabling collaborative government through real-time communications, visual collaboration can help here. The RoI can be achieved in three to four months. Policy makers are pushing to deploy video solutions right to the district level.
This is the year of Video-as-a-Service. Videoconferencing has evolved considerably from its early days circa 1998. The major drivers for the adoption of these solutions are mobile device proliferation, network readiness, Cloud delivery, social connectedness and the fact that there is a generation being raised on video.
Various deployment models can be adopted including on-premise as well as private or public Cloud. According to Verma, “Unified collaboration improves collaboration and efficiency in a department. The decision-making process is expedited.”
It improves the delivery of G2C services and can even play a big role in emergency management as having the stakeholders available online, makes it easy to have emergency processes in place.
