January 11, 2019
Dear Everyone:
I attended an ARMA Chapter Meeting yesterday in
Milpitas, which is about
an hour’s drive away, if you avoid commute time.
Lately, the Mount Diablo Chapter Board has taken to
“piggybacking” onto whatever the Silicon Valley Chapter is doing.
When Silicon Valley announced that they were having a local
consultant come in to talk about the
California Consumer Privacy Act
(CCPA), and planning to have a “Virtual Meeting” in the bargain,
“Becky”, the Mount Diablo Chapter Vice President, who is also on the
Silicon Valley Board, suggested a “joint” chapter meeting; and
“Veronica”, the Mount Diablo Chapter President leaped at the
opportunity, to the point of leaving me less than a week in which to
draft an Event page on our website and send out the announcements.
As it was, apart from “Becky”, I was the only Mount Diablo Chapter
member to attend, except for “Veronica” and “Natasha”, the Chapter
Secretary, who work in the same office, and who chose to attend
“virtually”. For myself, I
figured it wasn’t much more difficult to drive down to Milpitas, than it
would be to try and “attend” via computer.
The Speaker was very knowledgeable and easily drew comparisons between
the need for a company to apply “Information Governance” (the latest
catch phrase) and the need to comply with the new California law, which
is meant to protect the personal information of California residents who
happen to have their data stored in a multitude of company databases.
Which is to say every person living in California who has ever ordered
anything online from anybody.
Ditto anyone whose personal information is stored in a California
database. Like
Facebook.
Or Google. Have a
“somebody@gmail.com” address?
Then you’re covered, even if you don’t live in California,
because Google does. Ever
purchase a book, or anything else, from
Amazon?
If you live in California, Amazon is required to safeguard your
personal information, even though the company is based in
Seattle.
You can begin to see why
Records Managers around the country are
salivating over this. It’s
the best thing to happen in Records and Information Management (RIM)
since
GDPR*.
I was also interested in seeing how the “virtual meeting” would go.
“Becky” happens to work for a technical company that “offered” to
host the virtual part of the meeting.
Our last meeting, in November, was also a “virtual meeting”.
I asked a couple of our Board members how the “virtual” part of
it went. In a word, not
well.
This did not surprise me.
Most people have no idea how a Virtual Meeting is different from a
Regular Meeting apart from the fact that many of the attendees are not
physically there. So, while
I was taking notes on yesterday’s Speaker’s presentation, I was also
jotting down a few notes separately about the “Do’s and Don’ts of
Virtual Meetings”.
Years ago, when I conducted training for the Company, I frequently had
one or more attendees who were in a different location.
In fact, sometimes I was the only person in the room as all of
the attendees were there “virtually”.
Consequently, I became something of an expert.
For one thing, I found it was important to find out if anyone was “out
there”. In the case of
training, people needed to get credit for taking the class, so I needed
to “certify” that they were actually tuned in, if only for the “roll
call”.
Another important point was that the presenter couldn’t see any of the
attendees. I would have no
idea if someone had a quizzical look on their face, indicating that they
were not exactly following what I was saying.
It became important to encourage people to say, “Question” if
they had one. I couldn’t see
if anyone was raising their hand.
Although some of the web-based services that accommodate these
kinds of meetings, do include the ability to “raise your hand”; you
click something and a little cartoon hand pops up on the screen.
Another thing was the necessity to speak s-l-o-w-l-y and c-l-e-a-r-l-y.
Talking too fast left everybody behind.
And even if someone was brave enough to require me to go back and
enunciate properly, it only slowed everything down.
Better to slow down at the beginning.
Also, it was important to be close enough to the polycom, or the
computer that was being used to transmit sound, that the people at the
other end could actually hear you.
Standing or sitting halfway across the table may make the Speaker
more comfortable, but it’s not much help to the “virtual attendees”.
Something I hadn’t thought of came up yesterday.
The Speaker had a habit of punctuating things by slapping his
hand down on top of the table.
Not only was it annoying to those of us in the room, but the poor
people on the phone had no way of knowing that it was coming.
Imagine: “A company
(Whap!!!) needs to apply (Whap!!!) retention at the minimum (Whap!!!) as
well as the maximum amount of time (Whap!!!).
We won’t even go into his habit of turning his back to the table to
glance up at the screen in order to find his place in the presentation.
For heaven’s sake!
They cover that in “Presentations 101”.
Love, as always,
Pete
*GDPR = General Data Protection Regulation, a European law.
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