Corporate Virtual Worlds Act As Sources Of Innovation

Many business leaders are skeptical of investing in virtual worlds because of the continuing lack of clarity regarding their proven benefits, but there are steps IT leaders can take to encourage corporate investment, according to Gartner. Haphazard investments in poorly planned virtual-world projects will continue to cause funding difficulties in some instances, but once the benefits have been proved; many organisations find that virtual worlds enhance casual social interactions inside the distributed enterprise, which can lead to innovation and produce competitive advantage.

“Despite understandable concerns about investment during a time of growing business uncertainty, we believe that the internal deployment of virtual worlds offers most enterprises significant benefits in cost savings and improved productivity,” said Steve Prentice, vice president and Gartner fellow.

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Prentice said that externally focussed virtual-world projects, however, remain difficult to justify for many enterprises. “Early attempts suffered from a lack of clear objectives and a limited understanding of the demographics, attitudes and expectations of virtual-world communities,” he said. “As a clearer understanding of the dynamics of this new media channel develops, we expect this situation to change during the next three years, but for the moment would advise organisations to focus on internal projects”.

Gartner recommends a three-step, incremental approach to virtual-world investment in which costs are constrained and benefits are clearly measurable to help gain the funding and approvals needed.

Virtual Worlds as Training Environments

Every organisation has a training budget, and role-playing and scenario-based training exercises are well-established in many fields. Virtual worlds with strong development tools (such as Second Life) can be used to replicate specific environments (such as a retail location or a street scene) in which trainees can interact with each other, the environment and their trainers via their avatars. The benefits of improved employee knowledge and training can be clearly enumerated, and the savings (or transference of funding) compared with established training methodologies can be reliably calculated to build a credible and substantiated business case.

Project-Based Avatar-Enhanced Collaboration

Having established a viable presence for virtual-world technology inside the enterprise, and begun to build basic virtual-world skills in the employee base, the second phase involves extending virtual-world deployment to support collaboration and employee interaction. Examples of successful projects of this type include worldwide product launches involving training, presentations and project planning that eliminate the need to bring employees from multiple locations to a single site, with substantial savings in travel and associated costs and time.

Non-specific Social Collaboration

Employee interaction and collaboration are well understood as key drivers in employee satisfaction, productivity and innovation. However, in the modern distributed business environment, with employees working from home offices, on the road or in multiple locations overseas, ‘casual social conversations’ that once took place around the water cooler no longer occur. Employees increasingly work in isolation and broader-based interdepartmental discussions that are often the source or seed of new ideas and innovations no longer take place.

The benefits can be significant, but will be hard to enumerate, because they will be predominantly in the ‘soft benefits’ area of employee satisfaction, morale, retention and innovation.

“The bottom line is to take a cautious and staged approach toward introducing virtual-world projects into the enterprise; moving too far and too fast will significantly reduce the chances of success, increase costs and make the benefits more difficult to quantify and attribute,” concluded Prentice.