of a hiatus," Prentice says, noting that over the past year or so, a number of companies shut down their virtual operations or just let their in-world sites turn into ghost towns. But that's not as dire as it sounds. Prentice says it's less a permanent corporate pullout than a temporary pullback for assessments.
"They're refocusing on how to use the technology, possibly using one of the virtual worlds to work better internally," he explains. "So they're looking at using it for collaboration vs. e-commerce. They're setting up meeting rooms in private areas so they can control access. It's a little like teleconferencing."
Some companies find significant value in internal collaboration. Text 100 Corp., a global public relations firm with 31 offices around the world, made its virtual-world debut last August with a companywide meeting.
CEO Aedhmar Hynes, who is based in Manhattan, says she scheduled the meeting so she could update employees on company news and celebrate some business milestones.
But the real benefit wasn't the easy and cost-efficient dissemination of information -- although that was important -- but rather the camaraderie built by the event, she says. "It really made us feel like one company, because everyone had a shared experience. It created a bond," she says.
The event also motivated employees to experiment with ways to collaborate in Second Life, she says.
"Once people created avatars, they were more likely to get involved and do things in Second Life," Hynes says, noting that she has seen smaller meetings and training sessions take place in-world since that first event last year.
Hynes says she initially heard about the virtual world in 2005 and soon realized that it was a technology that could increase internal collaboration as well as collaboration with clients. She also saw the virtual environment as an important marketing opportunity.
Erica Driver, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc., says there are several areas where virtual-world technologies will be critical for companies. One is viewing, analyzing, presenting or interacting with complex data. Another is learning new skills or rehearsing material. (You can't stage a fire on a real oil platform, but you can run through it virtually, she says.) A third is transforming presentations into tours that take place in virtual worlds.
IBM is looking at the virtual world for all of that. Its employees have had meetings, events and training sessions in-world, both at its own internal site and in Second Life.
It's also looking to use the medium to sell its products and services to other companies. "It's just a very powerful way of meeting, interacting and doing work with other people," says IBM executive consultant Doug McDavid. He says that about 6,000 to 7,000 IBM employees have avatars.
An early meeting took place in the fall of 2006, when IBM workers met in the auditorium on a private island that the company purchased in Second Life. (Owners of such islands can restrict access to authorized avatars, allowing for private exchanges.)
And late last year, IBM ran a training session for project managers using a virtual world built behind its own corporate firewall, says Susan Stucky, who manages the service design group in the Services Research Center at IBM's Almaden Research Center.
The training exercise centered on a fictional company that was changing from auto parts shipping to auto assembly. In this exercise, IBM had to adjust an existing contract with the company to meet its evolving needs.
In two eight-hour sessions, about a dozen project managers located in different offices went in-world to work as a team to renegotiate IBM's contract with the company. Using avatars, the project managers had to designate responsibilities, make proposals and pitches, and interact with the company's CEO and CIO -- everything that would happen in a real-life situation.
Stucky says IBM didn't do a formal return-on-investment study but still found that holding the exercise in a virtual world offered important benefits. For example, she says, it clearly saved the company money. It was
Post new comment