Meeting the £12,500 IT costs of meetings

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Meeting room problems cost the average British business £12,500 per year, according to a report from researchers at Dynamic Markets.

On the basis there are 8,265 large companies in the UK, the research team estimated a total cost of £103 million.

In many meeting rooms, laptop projectors have replaced the range of whiteboards, video players, film and slide projectors that littered meeting rooms a decade or so ago. Even so, simplification has not eliminated problems.

Research commissioners Casio claimed 46 per cent of presenters had experienced technical hitches over the past year, putting a strain on IT support teams.

Daniel Laurenson, IT manager for Cofely-GDF Suez, a provider of environmental efficiency services, said: “The surprising price tag put on support in the report got me doing the sums for myself. This brought my attention to how I could reduce the cost.”

“It’s a question of cost versus value and it seems to make sense that spending more money on new equipment in the short term can actually offer a good return on investment in the long term.”

His 30-strong UK IT team manages approximately 34 meeting rooms across the company’s sites and he calculated support requests cost approximately £5,280 per year in labour and a further £1,200 per year for hard maintenance costs.

Laurenson also worked out his team gave about seven hours per week to meeting room support, equating to around 29 per cent of second-line support’s daily working time.

“In my experience, the biggest problem is a lack of user understanding of how these technologies work,” he added.

“To mitigate call-outs resulting from this problem it is really important to both standardise and simplify meeting room hardware. If you can do this successfully I believe it is possible to reduce the number of meeting room technology support requests by up to 70 per cent.”

The report also revealed the average round trip between a support desk and a meeting room is 92 metres. The annual distance covered by the IT manager is equivalent to walking the London marathon or hiking from Tower Bridge to Gatwick Airport.

Despite these figures, businesses do not seem to consider the cost. Only 43 per cent of the sample said they tracked meeting room support and maintenance costs.

Dynamic Markets interviewed 200 business executives and 100 IT managers for the survey.

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