MEE-ROI (Meeting ROI)

One of my “tangential” ideas- I hope I can patent this. If anyone has directions on how to patent an idea, please it to me over email. Okay here is the idea for the product!

In the IT services industry, there is a term called, “Global Delivery Model” which is basically doing the IT services in delivery locations which are cost optimal (leveraging the labor arbitrage) and giving a seamless support services for the customer in a 24x7 model. This is also called, “follow the sun” approach. So in a global delivery model, IT service firms will have teams located at multiple locations across the globe servicing the customer. In this context, communication and collaboration are of paramount importance. So how do we communicate? There is a conference bridge number and there is a calendar- We send the invite based on everyone’s convenient time, join the call, discuss things (it can be anything related to customer services or the firm), jot down MOM (minutes of the meeting) and associate action items with respective owners. Every day, millions of conference calls happen across the globe between customers, vendors and suppliers.

Given this backdrop, here comes my idea- It is actually a product. I have named it as MEEROI in short for Meeting-ROI. This product features are as follows:
• Speech to Text conversion
• Jot down Action items and owners
• Automated email to the group based on the bridge id or passcode
• Calculate the number of people who have joined the call based on the beep and their names
• Populate their base compensation rate by the hour and calculate the burn rate in $$ for that particular meeting/conference call
• Finally give the figure for the “$$” value of the meetings/conference calls

Of course this is the tangible part and there are intangible aspects for a conference call for a meeting. Purists will argue that this will defy the purpose of a meeting or a conference call. That is beyond the scope of this product on how and where to use it. I think, it is important to understand how much we “spend” on meetings. I am not advocating actions or decisions based on this data- I am just talking purely from a base-lining perspective as today we spend insane amount of time on “meetings”.

This product can also capture “value added” time and “non value added” time based on how we define value and an associated cost. The cool thing is the fact that we know before-hand how much we are going to burn and that’s a great part!

The target market for this product to begin with would be the IT services firm which engage in servicing off-shoring and outsourcing work. Over time, it can be combined with big telecommunication majors as one of the freebie. This product is also good for all firms that are looking at cutting costs on just meetings!

I don’t know whether this product exists today but this idea occurred to me and I am blogging it. If it does not exist, this blog post is my copy right!  If it does exist, please ignore this post.