Today, it's hard to imagine being able to get our jobs done without the Web. Within five years, the same will be true of the immersive Internet. We will "go to work" in virtual worlds and on virtual campuses where we will use immersive workspaces, learning simulations and function- and industry-specific applications. In these environments, many of which will be 3-D, we will learn and rehearse business activities, communicate and collaborate with colleagues, prototype products, recruit and interview job candidates, visualize complex data and remotely manage systems and facilities - maybe even vehicles. We will be embodied through avatars (personas) and identifiable to others through rich profiles, allowing us to interact with each other, information, physical systems and objects virtually, socially and in a way that feels real.
The immersive Internet will deliver an unprecedented level of engagement - emotional involvement with or commitment to our technology and our work. Some virtual worlds, immersive Internet sites and applications will accomplish this through a high degree of visual realism, with photorealistic avatars, objects and environments as well as realistic "physics" (e.g., gravity, wind and collisions). Others will offer a high degree of data realism, meaning they are fed by current, accurate information (e.g., weather, radio frequency identification [RFID] or global positioning system [GPS] data, real-time system status or data from product lifecycle management [PLM] systems). For some uses, the holy grail will be environments that deliver high levels of both visual and data realism. In other cases, neither of these will matter. It will be more important that people can express their personalities in the environment or build new virtual objects, and having real data tied into the system won't add a whole lot of value.
Examples of Business Value from Early Adopters
While the immersive Internet certainly has its cool factor, the main reason IT decision-makers should be paying attention to it is its business value. Let's explore a few examples from companies in the professional services, automotive and software industries.
Accenture's investment in a virtual recruiting center paid off after five to six networking events. After the global recruitment marketing team at Accenture began to see a pattern in a number of small virtual efforts taking place around the company, it pulled resources together and built a recruiting island in the virtual world Second Life. Here, the company holds networking and recruiting events targeting what it calls the "Facebook audience." The company has already found hires through events online ("in-world," in virtual world parlance). In fact, the island paid for itself after just five or six events. If you think about recruitment at Accenture taking place in 49 countries around the world, and each of these countries using the Accenture careers island rather than building its own, the cost savings start to stack up. Also, recruiting becomes more standardized across the regions as recruiting staff all begin to use the same materials and processes.
Michelin IT professionals report that enterprise architecture (EA) training in-world is highly effective. Michelin Group has a strong EA approach, which is instrumental in aligning IT with the company's business ambitions and goals. The EA group's challenge is to ensure that IT professionals throughout the company understand the EA methodology as they develop specifications for the company's global applications. Traditional EA training approaches failed to deliver strong buy-in from IT pros. So the company tried a new approach: it built an island in Second Life designed specifically to teach IT pros about EA concepts. It is a highly interactive environment that combines presentations and hands-on workshops. The project, which costs about $60,000, has been a success so far. Of more than 160 IT professionals who have gone through the training as of early August 2008, 96 percent said the training session enabled them to better understand the basics of EA, 98 percent said Second Life is an appropriate medium for learning about EA and 97 percent said they would be able to return to Second Life later on their own (see Figure 1).
At Microsoft, the cost of virtual events is approximately one-third the cost of physical events. In April 2008, Microsoft launched three new products (SQL Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 and Visual Studio 2008) in Second Life. The company wound up with a 150 percent attendance rate (more people attended than had registered) and a 90 percent retention rate (most people stayed for the entire day). The cost of the in-world event was about $4,000 - much less expensive than a traditional product launch event. Microsoft didn't have to rent a meeting room, cater in food or pay for airfare and hotel rooms for speakers coming in from out of town. The company estimates that now that it has built many of the assets it needs for in-world events (e.g., meeting spaces, presentation screens, etc.), it is able to run in-world events for approximately one-third of the cost of doing comparable physical events. As you scale up the number of attendees at in-world events, the cost per attendee drops down even lower.
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