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.

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