Analyst firm Gartner is releasing a new report investigating how enterprises can justify investing in virtual world projects - called logically enough 'How to Justify Enterprise Investment in Virtual Worlds'. It offers a three-step approach to ensure businesses get their money's worth out of virtual worlds (the premise that they should be investing appears to be taken as a given).
“Despite understandable concerns about investment during a time of growing business uncertainty, we believe that the internal deployment of virtual worlds offers most enterprises significant benefits in cost savings and improved productivity,” says Gartner’s Steve Prentice, who wrote the report. “Early attempts suffered from a lack of clear objectives and a limited understanding of the demographics, attitudes and expectations of virtual-world communities. As a clearer understanding of the dynamics of this new media channel develops, we expect this situation to change during the next three years, but for the moment would advise organizations to focus on internal projects.”
The three stages suggested by the new report are: Virtual Worlds as Training Environments; Project-Based Avatar-Enhanced Collaboration; and Nonspecific Social Collaboration.
The first involves using worlds like Second Life to replicate scenario-based training exercises - the report cites retail locations and street scenes, as well as more specific applications for military, law enforcement and emergency service use. Gartner suggests that this stage is the easiest way for businesses to justify their investment, through the savings they make compared to traditional training.
The second stage involves getting more employees immersed in the corporate virtual world, creating their own avatars and interacting with each other - training, presentations and project planning meetings, for example. Again, Gartner says the justification can be quantified by measuring travel and time savings, as well as the way a virtual world is cheaper to run than expensive videoconferencing and telepresence systems.
The third stage is the one that might take business leaders longer to get their heads around, since it’s about employees interacting for no direct business purpose (this is why it’s the third stage). In other words, just having a chat - a virtual replacement for the watercooler, for remote employees. Or, as the report puts it: “A virtual world recreation of the social environment - seating areas, white boards, even a virtual water cooler - can serve a valuable function in recovering the disassembled social cohesion of the workforce.”
The full report can be purchased by clicking here.
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