Economic slowdown will spur enterprise Immersive Internet adoption

by Sam Driver and Erica Driver. 

A question echoing around the Immersive Internet technology community is whether the current global financial situation will have a big impact on this emerging technology market.  The short answer is yes.  What might surprise some observers is that the impact is likely to be a net positive.  Why? Immersive Internet technology is perfectly suited to helping organizations cut costs and increase efficiency. 

Organizations are cutting costs left and right to combat the economic downturn. On October 22, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that in September of 2008, layoffs reached their highest level since September of 2001. In the last couple of weeks alone, eBay announced it will lay off 10% of its workforce; Lear Corporation announced a 12-month, $150 million operating improvement program; SAP issued a hiring freeze and is trimming costs like travel expenses; and Yahoo! Inc announced it would reduce its current annualized run rate by $400 million before the end of 2008, laying off 10% of its workforce in the process. Numbers like these suggest that we are likely to see across-the-board spending cuts.

As a result, ThinkBalm expects to see investment in Immersive Internet technology as a cost-saving measure.

• CIOs are focused on business process improvement to cut costs and increase productivity. Survey data from CIO Insight Research’s October 2008 study, “BPI: The CIO’s Secret Weapon” shows that reducing costs and increasing productivity are the leading drivers of business process improvement efforts. Seventy three percent of IT executives surveyed say that in an economic downturn they are focused on business process improvement to improve productivity and 69% say they do it to reduce costs. The top-priority business processes targeted for improvement are strategic / business planning, sales and marketing, financial, and IT management. Also, 36% of respondents said that collaboration tools, including groupware, are among the top 3 contributors to business process improvement. As the next generation of collaboration technology, Immersive Internet technologies have a prime role to play here.
• Immersive Internet implementations demonstrate hard cost savings. With Immersive Internet investments, organizations are achieving cost savings in areas like business travel, meetings and conferences (e.g., renting hotel conference rooms, serving food), and data center and facility operations. For example, Microsoft found that virtual marketing events cost about 1/3 that of physical events.  (See the related ThinkBalm article, At Microsoft, cost of virtual events about 1/3 the cost of traditional events.) In another example, Accenture found it could cost-effectively find tech savvy employees using Second Life and the company’s investment in its Second Life island paid for itself after 5 or 6 in-world recruiting-oriented events. (See the related ThinkBalm article, Accenture recruiting in Second Life cost-effectively targets the “Facebook audience.” And in a third example, Implenia has found that remote facility management can result in savings of 20% over traditional methods.   

Think of the Immersive Internet as a giant cost savings generator

Immersive Internet technology can be used to generate cost savings in many areas (see Figure 1). Some use cases are more common than others. The most common work-related use of Second Life, as an example, are teaching and/or learning, collaborating with others to get work done, holding or attending scheduled meetings, and visualizing information in 3D. (See the related ThinkBalm article, Second Life survey says: “Try it for work — you’ll like it.”) 

 

Our recommendation: pick a key business process or activity that is impacted by cost reduction measures in your organization and apply Immersive Internet technology to it immediately. The technology can be relatively inexpensive (depending on which products you implement) and the payoff can be significant and immediate — especially in areas like increasing workforce productivity while reducing business travel, and increasing workforce proficiency gain at a lower cost than with traditional methods of training.

© 2008 ThinkBalm. All rights reserved.

The ThinkBalm Innovation Community brainstorms in 3D!

by Erica Driver and Sam Driver.

Last Friday the ThinkBalm Innovation Community held its second community brainstorming session. The objective for these sessions: to collaboratively find solutions to problems associated with enterprise adoption of the Immersive Internet. The benefit: address challenges individuals are dealing with while gaining hands-on experience with a variety of immersive environments. One of the ThinkBalm Innovation Community members — Jeff Lowe, an Oklahoma-based consultant and project manager who writes the The Immersive Life blog — “founded” the original idea to hold this brainstorming series. Other community members hopped on board and self-formed an idea team to help evolve Jeff’s original idea. ThinkBalm’s intention is that ThinkBalm Innovation Community members who benefit from these sessions will take the practices they learn and experiences they have back to their own organizations.

For Brainstorming Session #2, eleven community members gathered in Second Life to discuss and propose solutions to a challenge one of the members submitted. The challenge can be summed up as: “What does a ‘believer’ need to do to convince colleagues that the Immersive Internet has business value? What can we do to get through the resistance / dismissiveness some people have to it?” Participants were all affiliated with different organizations. Most had never met each other before this session.

We began the session by introducing ourselves and familiarizing ourselves with a 3D brainstorming tool Jeff Lowe built and an interactive polling tool he provided for our use. We moved through the discussion, communicating with each other via a mix of voice and text chat and adding nodes to a 3D mind map (see Figure 1). As we talked, text chats and entries people were making into the mind mapping tool scrolled by on our screens. By the end of the hour the 3D mind map had about 3 dozen nodes bearing names like “orientation experience,” “games = not work” and “risky training scenarios,” some of which included additional notes. 

 

 

We’ve learned a few lessons along the way

• IT security concerns are preventing people from gaining valuable experience. Due to IT security restrictions, not everyone can access Second Life (or other immersive environments – sometimes even Web-based ones, if even a small Java download is required) while they’re at work. No matter which immersive environment the ThinkBalm Innovation Community has used for our meetings, there is always someone who can’t participate for this reason. And sometimes even when people can access the immersive environment, they can’t use voice over IP because IT has shut it down. We can always resort to the telephone but this means participants can no longer see who is speaking during the meeting — a benefit of integrated VoIP. And we can always resort to text chat, but this can negatively impact the quantity and quality of communication. 
• People without voice communications are at a disadvantage in in-world meetings. While we use voice over IP (e.g., Skype, Second Life, or Microsoft Office Live Meeting 2007) for most of our in-world meetings, we sometimes run into a problem where some participants can’t fully participate because they don’t have microphones, don’t know how to configure their system for VoIP, use Macs (which Microsoft Office Live Meeting 2007 doesn’t support for voice), or have IT organizations that have locked down the use of VoIP. These participants are relegated to the virtual worlds equivalent of the remote meeting attendee who dials in via phone and is represented by the gray box on the meeting room table. They can be forgotten by the meeting participants who are together in a room together (in the physical world) or who have access to VoIP (in the virtual world). 
• You think multitasking is bad now . . . It is common for information workers to be talking on the phone at the same time they are taking notes, viewing presentation materials, checking email, or IMing. Our experience during this brainstorming session is that while an immersive environment increases engagement many times over compared to a traditional teleconference or Web conference, the multi-tasking can also be more intense. Participants were listening to the conversation and participating via voice or text chat, navigating their avatars around the room, typing into the chat field to interact with the brainstorming tool, zooming their camera in and out to see the nodes on the mind map more easily, and occasionally viewing a poster containing instructions. This is bound to be easier for people who have played multiplayer video games; but for those who haven’t it can be a real challenge.
• A big question: how to preserve the artifacts of collaboration. Our plan was that after the meeting we would click on each node in the mind map to expand the notes associated with it, and manually create from this a Microsoft Word outline of the meeting for each participant to have. Not a straightforward task. We also took snapshots during the session (see these pictures on Flickr) and one participant made a short movie. Jeff Lowe also created a “read-only” version of the completed mind map for all participants to take away with them. All this is a lot more complicated than simply distributing a Word doc upon conclusion of a traditional meeting. But it was a lot easier to collaborative create our 3D mind map than it would have been to try to have 11 people contribute to the same Word document in real time.
• It’s a big challenge when avatars don’t share peoples’ real names. For this brainstorming session we used Second Life. Second Life residents (with rare exception) do not have the option of having their real names appear over their avatars’ heads. This causes huge problems in the business context when people aren’t familiar with each others’ avatars and avatar names — and can even be an issue when some participants are familiar with each other. Part of the Second Life culture is that people refer to each other in voice and text conversations by their avatar names, which can cause a sort of “split personality” problem in business meetings. In this brainstorming session, the eleven participants had to try to remember not only the real names of the other people in the meeting, but which avatar name matches which person’s name. This distraction detracted significantly from the meeting experience compared to meetings we’ve held in OpenSim, for example, where avatars can share the user’s real name.
• Being able to visualize the conversation helped guide the conversation. At least some of the participants frequently referenced the 3D construct to quickly see which topics were trending and getting the most attention and which were needing more focus and then contributed accordingly.  Most of the time, the construct lagged the voice conversation, but there were times that the contributions to the construct led and redirected the voice conversation.
• 3D brainstorming is a worthwhile way for busy people to spend an hour. At the end of the session we did a quick poll asking for feedback on the session, using the interactive polling tool (see Figure 2). We asked participants to click on the red square to indicate their feedback was “excellent,” the green square for “pretty good,” yellow for “needs tweaking,” and blue for “poor.” As you can see by the red and green columns standing next to the polling machine, all participants felt their hour was well-spent. Here we were, a collection of unaffiliated people with a common interest in progressing enterprise adoption of the Immersive Internet forward. Using an immersive environment and experimental 3D brainstorming tool, real work got done. We generated lots of good ideas that each of us can use in our own work.

 

© 2008 ThinkBalm. All rights reserved

Immersive Internet insights from IBM’s InnovationJam 2008

by Erica Driver.

I was privileged to be able to participate in IBM’s recent InnovationJam 2008 which was a massive, Internet-based conversation that took place October 5-8, 2008. During this four-day period, IBM saw nearly 90,000 InnovationJam logins and 30,000 posts. The conversation involved tens of thousands of people from all around the globe — IBMers as well as customers, suppliers, partners, and industry analysts like me. It was designed to dig more deeply into findings from IBM’s Global CEO Study 2008, in which more than 1,100 CEOs from a wide variety of regions and industries disclosed their aspirations. IBM structured InnovationJam 2008 around four areas of inquiry: Built for Change, Customers as Partners, Globally Integrated, and The Planet and its People.

Topics related to enterprise use of the Immersive Internet surfaced in all four areas of inquiry, with the most activity concentrated in Customers as Partners (see Figure 1).

• Judging by manual analysis of keyword search results, the Immersive Internet was small fry overall. Overall, Immersive Internet-related keywords were used in just a small percentage of the nearly 30,000 posts people made (see Figure 2). For example, the term “virtual” was used in just 5% of all Jam posts and in 12% of posts in the Customers as Partners area of inquiry (and keep in mind the word virtual has many meanings within the IT context -– it does not always refer to virtual worlds). Other common terms like “virtual world,” “virtual community,” and “Second Life” appeared in a tiny percentage of posts. It’s in the Customers as Partners area of inquiry that participants used Immersive Internet terms most steadily.



• But topic clouds indicate Immersive Internet leanings, again especially in the Customers as Partners area. The theme cloud generated by the text-mining tool IBM used for the Jam is drawn from the top 10 discussion threads that most closely represented that theme/discussion. The taxonomy that supported generation of “themes” is not a pure word match but also looks for synonyms, affinities, and other pairings within the vocabulary created, prior to and evolving during the Jam. The highest-level Jam theme cloud contains the word “virtual” as well as terms related to common Immersive Internet use cases (like “collaborate,” “communicate,” “meetings,” and “learn”) (see Figure 3). More specific Immersive Internet topics made it onto the theme cloud for the Customers as Partners area of inquiry, where you see terms like “virtual worlds,” “virtual communities,” and “game.”

What it means for Immersive Internet advocates and implementers

As evidenced by the activity that took place during IBM InnovationJam 2008, the Immersive Internet:

• Is still in the “seedling” stage of adoption, and intensified evangelism is needed. As evidenced by the small percentage of total InnovationJam 2008 posts that were about enterprise use of the Immersive Internet, much more work is needed to evangelize the business benefits of immersive technology. Even some Jam participants who work for IBM, which is one of the leading innovators in enterprise use of the Immersive Internet, didn’t know about some of the highly visible projects IBM has ongoing. And IBM has gone much farther than other organizations that are experimenting with the Immersive Internet – IBM has a two-year-old internal Virtual Universe Community that comprises more than 5,000 members, and has designated people (like Ian Hughes and Rob Smart) whose job it is to evangelize the Immersive Internet both inside and outside the company. The problem is largely cultural; work and games are coinciding in the Immersive Internet, and most business people do not yet know how to make sense of it.
• Will enable breakthrough inter-enterprise collaboration. The fact that most of the Immersive Internet posts in InnovationJam 2008 were under the “customers as partners” category is a leading indicator that this technology has the potential to jumpstart inter-enterprise collaboration. Immersive environments are terrific tools for all sorts of collaboration — collaborative concept prototyping, design and development, business activity rehearsal, learning and development, remote facility management, meetings and conferences, data visualization, and recruiting and onboarding. The new category of software ThinkBalm calls enterprise immersive platforms has built-in functionality for collaboration and communication (e.g., voice over IP, text chat, meeting spaces, presentation sharing tools) and some of the vendors are working to integrate their products with existing enterprise collaboration platforms (e.g., Forterra’s work to integrate its OLIVE platform with IBM Lotus Sametime). (See the related ThinkBalm article, Information work is going immersive.)
• Has tremendous potential to solve real business problems. As this IBM InnovationJam made clear, there is no shortage of interest in and ideas about using the Immersive Internet to solve real-world business problems. ThinkBalm is seeing organizations in a variety of sectors derive measurable benefit from the Immersive Internet in areas like using inexpensively made concept prototypes to garner funding for technology investments, reducing the cost of marketing events, or more effectively hiring desired job candidates. See these related ThinkBalm articles: Digital prototypes help university team get $550k+ in technology funding and  Accenture recruiting in Second Life cost-effectively targets the “Facebook audience” and At Microsoft, cost of virtual events about 1/3 the cost of traditional events.

© 2008 ThinkBalm. All rights reserved.

Second Life survey says: “Try it for work — you’ll like it”

by Erica Driver and Sam Driver.

The non-profit Social Research Foundation recently announced the results of its Second Life Annual Survey 2008, a Web-based survey of 1,258 Second Life residents who are part of the organization’s First Opinions Panel™. Thanks to Social Research Foundation, ThinkBalm was able to contribute a few questions about work-related usage of Second Life. Here are some findings from the survey, which was fielded in September of 2008.

Most residents surveyed don’t use Second Life for work

Only about a sixth of the 1,258 survey respondents (16%) say they use Second Life for business purposes related to their primary occupation (see Figure 1). The vast majority (84%) say they do not. And use of Second Life for professional activities including training is down slightly in 2008 vs. 2007 (see Figure 2). While 16% of the 1,258 respondents say they are doing more professional activity in Second Life this year compared to last year, 19% say they are doing less.

 

But of those who use Second Life for work, more than 1/3 indicate they use it mostly for that purpose

More than 1/3 (71, or 36%) of the 198 respondents who use Second Life for activities related to their primary occupation say that more than half of their time spent in Second Life is job-related (see Figure 3). Of these, 29 (15%) say they spend half to three quarters of their in-world time on work-related activities and 42 (21%) say they spend three quarters to all of their in-world time this way. Most respondents (125, or 63%) spend half or less of their time in Second Life working.

The most common work-related uses: teaching/learning, collaboration, and meetings

The most common professional uses of Second Life are teaching and/or learning, collaboration, and meetings (see Figure 4). These findings reflect what we have seen anecdotally, and not just in Second Life. These are the most common enterprise Immersive Internet use cases regardless of technology used. 

• As was expected . . . Of the 198 survey respondents who say they use Second Life for work-related purposes, 114 (58%) say they use Second Life for teaching and/or learning and 32 (16%) use it for a related purpose: to rehearse or practice business activities. Eighty six (43%) say they use it for collaborating with others to get work done and 81 (41%) say they use it to hold or attend scheduled meetings.
• But there were surprises. We are surprised to see that as many as 70 respondents (35%) are using Second Life to visualize information in 3D. 3D data and concept visualization will emerge as killer apps for immersive technology in 2009 and 2010 because they allow us to do things we simply can’t in the physical world or with flat 2D technology. We were also surprised to see that as many as 34 (17%) respondents are using Second Life for recruiting or interviewing and 23 (12%) are using it to manage real-world systems. We expected these numbers to be much lower.

People who do use Second Life for work expect to keep on doing so in 2009

Ninety nine (50%) of the 198 respondents who use Second Life for work-related purposes in 2008 expect to spend more time on work-related activities in Second Life in 2009 (see Figure 5). Another 60 (30%) expect the amount of time to remain about the same. Only 18 respondents (10%) expect to decrease the amount of time they spend working in Second Life in 2009.

What it means for Immersive Internet advocates and implementers

• Deliver first-hand experiences to new users whenever possible. People who get hands-on experience using an immersive environment for work tend to see the value in it, and plan to use it more in the future. This highlights the importance of providing first-hand experiences to prospective users as part of the evangelism effort. Without actually using an immersive environment to get real work done, it’s hard for many people to comprehend its impact. You can always start with the common use cases, like learning & training and meetings and collaboration.
• Remember: this survey data is only about Second Life. This data does not show us what is going on with experimentation and adoption of other enterprise immersive platforms. (ThinkBalm is tracking about two dozen enterprise immersive platform vendors.) While the question of which enterprise immerisve platforms an organization is using isn’t addressed at all in these survey questions, we’ve seen anecdotal evidence that sometimes an enterprise project team experiments in Second Life and then uses another platform, one designed for enterprise use, for bigger pilots or production projects.
• 2008 is a landmark year for enterprise adoption of the Immersive Internet. While self-reported overall use of Second Life for work-related purposes dropped slightly in 2008 compared to 2007, expected use is going up — a lot. While the industry is currently in the “seedling” stage of adoption, ThinkBalm foresees that enterprise use will be mainstream in five years (see Figure 6). The main reasons for this area 1) convergence of hardware, software, and network bandwidth, which make immersive technologies accessible on a widespread basis, 2) the prevalence of social networking, which allows Immersive Internet experts and advocates to find each other and share ideas, learnings, and best practices, and 3) an economic downturn, which will favor IT investments that result in hard dollar cost savings.

 © 2008 ThinkBalm. All rights reserved