As an evolution of video game technology, the idea of virtual worlds in business generates mixed reactions to their possible use and efficacy. The younger generation, fully familiar with consumer virtual worlds and video games, immediately sees the application to the business problems they tackle today.
Many managers are also quickly energized and excited by the possibilities. But making the decision to pursue a virtual world solution creates some challenges for management, instructional designers, the Information Technology (IT) staff, and the developers of virtual worlds themselves.
The benefits of virtual worlds are well documented in articles in trade magazines, blogs, and vendor sites. My purpose here is not to duplicate that documentation. Instead, I present a number of management considerations that bear on the business value and potential return on enterprise adoption of virtual worlds as a venue for learning.
Each new technical medium runs into common obstacles as well as unique barriers to its adoption. But attitudes change when proven value or competitive advantage are achieved. The value of virtual-world technology will evolve as business models continue to become more intensely collaborative internally, externally, and globally. Even regulatory legislation is a factor: greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are already driving increased interest in better virtual meeting technologies.
However, as with any disruptive technology there may be far more significant opportunities. While sustainability is a fresh driving force, we also waste our workforce’s talent in innumerable ways, much as we waste natural resources. In particular, there may be an opportunity to rethink the values and processes for decision-making, meetings and their attendance, learning and development, and how managers and individual contributors spend their time in an increasingly technology-rich, collaborative world.
The barriers to exploring, embracing, and building business value on the disruptive platform of virtual worlds are more than just the technological obstacles. They include management inertia, the cross-functional nature of a virtual world solution, generational differences in comfort with technology, sponsorship, and prejudging the value (and cost) of a video game-like environment. All of these play in tangled roles.
My focus here is on 3-D immersive solutions. While simple virtual worlds built with 2-D technology, where the technology challenges are less complex, have business application benefits, the barriers are the same, and the solutions are less engaging. In 3-D immersive worlds, you can, through your avatar, freely explore the environment, interact with objects, and communicate with others through their avatars. “Immersiveness” is a critical measure of the value of these virtual worlds, with the potential to deliver the visceral reactions and the full spectrum of emotional and intellectual engagement for the situation at hand. Immersiveness is at the core of what we will eventually know as Web 3.0.
Virtual worlds and personal technology evolution
What’s going on? We are in a time of transition for technology-based applications. On the one hand the personal computer is becoming smaller, lighter, and more dependent on the network. The broad market has been moving to smaller, mobile, less expensive devices, and for years desktops have been losing market share to laptops. Devices are quickly moving beyond laptops, to netbooks and smart phones, pushing data and computation onto Internet servers, and into cloud computing and SaaS (Software as a Service). They are heavily dependent on robust communications technology.
At the same time, personal computers are becoming more powerful, particularly in graphics processing. Graphics processors are easily the most expensive component of a gamer’s computer today. On this end of the spectrum, the processing technology is as critical as the communications technology. Both are necessary to create the engaging, immersive, and stunning virtual world, and of course, gaming experiences.
Virtual worlds clearly work best with high-end graphics and high bandwidth – which for good reasons (such as cost) are less common in the corporate world. This is but one of the corporate technology constraints that has created some of the difficulties keeping virtual worlds from gaining acceptance. In many corporations, a lack of investment in client technologies has led to an infrastructure built on old technologies, and on new technologies with minimal capability.
The predominant graphics processing for laptops is “integrated graphics,” where computational and graphics processing and memory (RAM) share the main CPU. While more than good enough for Internet browsing and PowerPoint, it has been inadequate for processing the intense requirements for virtual worlds. Integrated graphics continues to evolve rapidly; but many who experience a graphics-intense program with inadequate technology don’t go back to try virtual worlds. This was a concern with the early Second Life corporate mini-boom two years ago. In addition, unless you are a technology aficionado, figuring out what is adequate technology isn’t easy. Graphic processor manufacturers utilize confusing product naming conventions, making it difficult to discern the actual capabilities. To their credit (and survival), virtual-world vendors are continually working to engineer their solutions to work with less powerful client technologies.
On the information technology security front, anything that penetrates the corporate firewall creates a headache for IT. In response, some corporations are beginning to explore technologies outside the traditional realm of IT’s locked-down standards. Applications running on iPods, cell phones, and Sony PlayStation® Portable (PSP) are emerging. This is reminiscent of the challenge that PCs presented to IT, when technology applications were served from locked-down mainframes and minicomputers.
Lack of innovation
The current economic downturn has certainly forced cost cutting, and it has lowered innovative efforts and risk tolerance. This is true at the personal level, where promoting a new business tool without attaching a strong ROI business case can generate career risk. It is also true at the management and business investment levels, where for many years the combination of learning and new technology has had less than stellar results. But innovation may also now be suppressed far earlier – possibly due to fatigue from re-engineering, and memories of the dot-com bust.
Economic downturns can create opportunities for transformative business value, but many virtual-world applications are sponsored in the Human Resources/Training realm, where most corporations look first to reduce expenses. Today, it seems innovation has been outsourced and is thriving in the start-up and technology world, but its (re-)integration has become a difficult task for both the corporation and the innovative supplier. It’s an unstable relationship, in which technologies embraced by consumers, and hyped by the media and the vendor, rise dramatically but then fall into oblivion. We’ve already seen the wild swings of MySpace and Second Life, and now even Twitter is beginning to feel the pain of being a once hot, “had to have” technology.
We live in a throwaway technology world – why? In business it’s because the tools are not connected to fundamental business needs, and the firm lacks the innovation to commit the tools, the risk, and investment to develop the business value. Vendors lack the business or management savvy to create the valuable solutions that the enterprise really needs. Due to investor funding practices, start-ups tend to become more purely technology-oriented, creating a scalable tool that is wandering about looking for a problem. Now, couple that with a diminishing population of corporate visionaries and early-adopters, and you have the Catch 22. It is extremely difficult to sell innovative tools, or even solutions into a hyper-pragmatic world, until that solution has been proven multiple times – in a firm’s specific industry.
Learning and development: desire is not enough
While for the most part Learning and Development specialists and departments (L&D) are excited about the possibilities of utilizing virtual world technologies, there are a few cultural challenges that can, and do, get in the way.
First of all, sometimes the desire may not even be there. L&D has a rich tradition of classroom and people-based training, á la university. After a mostly disappointing adventure with technology in e-Learning, and a few hiccups in the implementation of a LMS, it’s understandable that there may not be a lot of support for introducing to management a technology that further distances personal interactions and represents a big leap forward for workforce technology. This is especially true if you grant that e-Learning represents a change as big as the introduction of PCs, cell phones, or Internet access.
Another cultural dilemma is that L&D, as a support organization (cost center), has no leverage to sell a business solution to business peers who have an ROI. Except in some very special circumstances, L&D has no:
- decision power,
- financial resources, or
- political power.
While many may disagree strongly with this assessment, the reality is that L&D “takes orders” from its business counterparts, and is generally not treated as a business peer with a seat at business strategy or operations tables. While this is unfortunate, a transformation of the L&D business relationship into a valued peer relationship can be achieved. It requires a lot of relationship work and guidance – for those who in general have supported and delivered exactly that for the rest of the organization.
Among all of the business units and functions L&D probably has the greatest cost sensitivity with the least amount of risk tolerance to deliver or extend services. While upwards of $750,000 may be spent for executive education or classroom simulations, the tradition of e-Learning keeps expectations of the cost of technology-related solutions at up to two orders of magnitude (100x) less. This is below a minimum threshold for virtual world applications.
Of course if L&D had business value credibility with business colleagues, then with a true ROI analysis (and not a pseudo-analysis simply calculated to pass some arbitrary hurdle rate,) the decision on virtual world use could and would be compared to any other corporate investment and expected return.
