Category: ThinkBalm Reports

Today ThinkBalm published a ground-breaking new research report: “ThinkBalm Immersive Internet Business Value Study, Q2 2009.”  The core question we set out to answer is, “What is the business value of using immersive technologies for work?” We surveyed 66 highly-qualified Immersive Internet practitioners and conducted 15 in-depth interviews. This research report contains our findings and analysis. To view or download a PDF version of this 36-page report, click the image below.

Key findings from the study:

• More than 40% of those surveyed (26 of 66) saw a positive total economic benefit from investments in immersive technologies in 2008 and 1Q 2009. More than 50% of respondents (34 of 65) expect to obtain a positive total economic benefit in 2009. The number of respondents who expect to obtain economic benefit of $25,000 USD or more in 2009 is more than double the number who indicated they achieved this level for 2008 / 1Q 2009.
• Nearly 30% of survey respondents (19 of 66) said their organization recouped their investment in immersive technologies in less than nine months, once their project(s) launched. Almost 30% of respondents (19 of 66) said their organization did not recoup their investment.  Another 38% (25 of 66) said they didn’t know if their organizations had recouped their investment. This is not an unexpected finding because many Immersive Internet initiatives in 2008 and 1Q 2009 were experiments or pilots.
• One third of respondents (22 of 66) said their project data shows success. Another 61% of respondents (40 of 66) said the project “feels like” a success, for a total of 94% of respondents.
• Over a third of those surveyed (23 of 64) said their organization will definitely expand investment in immersive technology in 2009 and 2010, and another 38% (24 of 64) indicated that they might expand their investment.
• The top motivations for investment in immersive technology in 2008 /1Q 2009 were enabling people in disparate locations to spend time together, increased innovation, and cost savings or avoidance.
• Early implementers are choosing the simplest use cases first. The most common were learning and training (80%, or 53 of 66 respondents focused on this use case) and meetings (76%, or 50 of 66 respondents). Some intend to take on more complex use cases in 2010 or 2011.
• Immersive technology won out over a variety of alternatives primarily due to low cost and the increased engagement it delivers. The leading alternatives were Web conferencing and in-person meetings, followed by phone calls. Nearly 60% of respondents (38 of 66) indicated that immersive technology was less expensive than alternatives, and 11% (7 of 66) reported that it was more expensive.
• Work-related use of the Immersive Internet is in the early adopter phase. Before it can pass into the early majority phase, practitioners and the technology vendors who serve them must “cross the chasm.” The most common barriers to adoption are target users having inadequate hardware, corporate security restrictions, and getting users interested in the technology.

Historically, journalists would go to a location and take notes about the scene or event or would interview people with relevant information, perhaps writing with a pencil in a ringed notebook. They would then return to the office to write the story. Nowadays, journalists use computers to write and mobile devices to collect and evaluate information. They have access to a wide range of tools to help them, including Google search, Wikipedia, email, blogs, wikis, and social networking tools. How will the Immersive Internet change all this? How will today’s journalist move on to take advantage of the next generation of technology and tools?

ThinkBalm principal Erica Driver is delivering a presentation on Monday, April 6^th at the Virtual Journalism Summit, being held by The Edward R. Murrow College of Communication at Washington State University in partnership with the McCormick Foundation. The event examines the growing popularity and influence of virtual worlds in the context of journalism. To prepare the presentation for this event, we convened 17 members of the ThinkBalm Innovation Community and conducted a 3D brainstorming session. Our objective was to generate and record as many relevant, insightful ideas as possible in an hour’s time. We brainstormed five questions for 10 minutes each, ranging from, “How comfortable are journalists with using the Immersive Internet?” to “How can journalists use the Immersive Internet to differentiate from competitors who don’t?” The two main findings from the brainstorming session were:

• The Immersive Internet presents multiple barriers to adoption for journalists
• The Immersive Internet will change the face of journalism

With the help of eleven ThinkBalm Innovation Community members – Cherisa Burk, Christopher Bishop, Christopher Simpson, Claus Nehmzow, Donald Schwartz, Ehsan Ehsani, Jan Herder, Leslie Ehle, Rita J. King, Robin Harper, and Steve Baxter – today ThinkBalm published the fourth issue in the Immersive Internet Storytelling Series, titled “Gathering Insights via 3D Brainstorming: ThinkBalm Innovation Community Looks at Future of Journalism.” The objective of this issue of the ThinkBalm Immersive Internet Storytelling Series is to paint a picture of the future of journalism, as affected by the Immersive Internet, while using the insight-gathering process as a vehicle for demonstrating how work will change. This report is both a take on the future of virtual journalism from the perspective of Immersive Internet advocates, implementers, and explorers, and a discussion about how 3D brainstorming can aid in support of development of ideas and presentation content. For a PDF of the report click this link or click the image of the report’s cover above.

One of the most significant barriers to adoption of the Immersive Internet at work is a steep learning curve exacerbated by what is all too often a often a poor first-time experience. Many peoples’ early forays into virtual

worlds and other immersive environments are tainted by technology and user experience issues. No matter which platform an organization uses, a newcomer training program is required. Training is the key to the success of a newcomer’s early experiences in immersive environments.

Members of the ThinkBalm Innovation Community have been putting our heads together to illuminate challenges and identify solutions to enterprise Immersive Internet problems since the community was launched in August of 2008. We discuss. We experiment. And on January, 9th, 2009, fourteen community members got together for a 90-minute role-playing session to 1) focus on what the newcomer experience is like and how to improve it, and 2) document our collective expertise.

We held the session in an immersive environment that was unfamiliar to most participants: Qwaq Forums, a business-oriented immersive platform for document and process collaboration.  ThinkBalm principals Erica Driver and Sam Driver and ThinkBalm Innovation Community member Cherisa Burk, a technologist with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, were already familiar with Qwaq Forums and played the role of “tour guides” (trainers). The tour guides were tasked with giving the rest of the participants, who played the role of newcomers (sometimes called newbies), the best introductory experience possible.

With the help of nine ThinkBalm Innovation Community members who attended this role-playing session — Cherisa Burk, Christopher Bishop, Darius Clarke,  Ehsan Ehsani, Gina Schreck, John Kinsella, Julie Fogg, Leslie Pagel, and Ron Teitelbaum — we wrote ThinkBalm’s third issue in the Immersive Internet Storytelling Series, titled “How To Give New Users A Good First Experience.” For a PDF of the report click this link or click the image of the article’s cover above.

Early today I published an article about a recent lightbulb moment: you’ve got to stay logged into the immersive environment where your tribe hangs out to get those serendipitous interactions that usually only occur when people are physically together in the same place. (See the ThinkBalm article, Lightbulb moment: for serendipity, stay logged into the immersive environment.) What I didn’t write about in that article is one of the challenges of staying logged in indefinitely: just because you’re logged in it doesn’t mean you’re available to converse with others.

In the physical world, you can be in the office and close your door when you don’t want to be disturbed. People can look through the window to see that you are meeting with someone or on the phone or knee-deep in paperwork. You can let phone calls go into voice mail. You can turn on your “out of office” message if you think it will be a while before you’ll be responding to email messages. But in an immersive environment, there is no standard protocol for letting others know you’re “sort of there” — you’re there but not available. The most common indicator is the head-down / arms-hung “AFK” pose that avatars take in Second Life and OpenSim when the user hasn’t touched the keyboard or mouse for a while.

So I took a shot at it. In the ThinkBalm Innovation Community space on ReactionGrid, an OpenSim grid, I created a simple space that serves as the immersive equivalent of a combined closed office door, voice mail box, and out of office message (see figure below). When I am logged into ReactionGrid but busy or away from my desk I’m going to try putting my avatar in this designated location, which is centrally located and easy to see. Partial walls are translucent so people can see that my avatar is in there. A sign outside says, “Hi! If you see Erica Driver’s avatar sitting here it means I’m on the phone or in a meeting. You can leave me a public text-based message by clicking here.” The visitor can click on the sign to go an EtherPad I set up on the Web. There they can leave me a text-based note, similarly to the way one might write a note on a whiteboard attached to an office or dorm room door. The EtherPad also contains my email address in case visitors don’t want to leave a publicly-displayed message.

I am at the beginning of a one- or two-week experiment to stay logged into this immersive environment whenever I am at my computer in an effort to strengthen my relationships with ThinkBalm Innovation Community members and learn some new things about using this emerging technology in the work context. Things I’m wondering about right now:

• There are so many technology options. I use various immersive environments for ThinkBalm Innovation Community activities and my work with ThinkBalm clients — not just ReactionGrid. And ReactionGrid is not the only place ThinkBalm Innovation Community members “pop in” — many also pop into Second Life. What is the impact of this fragmented market on my ability to benefit from serendipitous interactions with the people who matter most to me, or who I’d like to get to know better?
• Managing another form of presence info might be tedious. Will it become too onerous to remember to move my avatar to my “I’m busy” spot when I’m no available? Given how hard it is to remember to set instant messaging presence information to “away” or “do not disturb,” or to turn or off email out of office messages, I suspect the answer might be yes.
• Will I get enough value out of these unplanned interactions? Will the effort be worthwhile? I suspect the answer is yes, but don’t have evidence for that yet. We’ll see how it goes! I’ll write again about this experiment during the next couple of weeks. Do check back.

Today ThinkBalm released its inaugural research report, titled “The Immersive Internet: Make Tactical Moves Today For Strategic Advantage Tomorrow.” This report is intended to help Immersive Internet advocates,implementers, and explorers decide if, when, and how to invest in Immersive Internet technology. Click this link or the image of the report cover to download the PDF.

Methodology

As an independent industry analyst firm, ThinkBalm has working knowledge of the Immersive Internet vendor landscape acquired through vendor briefings and demos, hands-on experience, user interviews, consulting work with our clients, and our work with the ThinkBalm Innovation Community, which currently has about 150 members. Nearly two dozen community members reviewed and contributed to this report prior to its publication. (Membership in the ThinkBalm Innovation Community is free. For information on becoming a member please email us at info@thinkbalm.com.)

Executive Summary

The Immersive Internet is a collection of emerging technologies combined with a social culture that has roots in gaming and virtual worlds. Virtual worlds and campuses, immersive learning simulations, serious games, and three-dimensional (3D) business applications deeply engross the user and give people experiences that are perceived as real even though they take place virtually. Properly implemented, this technology promises to uncover previously unheard-of dimensions in engagement, which will in turn increase workforce collaboration, effectiveness, and retention. When the Immersive Internet is used with the extended enterprise, it will have similar positive impacts on customer, partner, and supplier relationships.
Adoption of the Immersive Internet for work is still in the “seedling” stage. We expect adoption will progress rapidly toward mainstream during the next five years because:

A slow economy and the green movement are influencing business decisions
Early case studies demonstrate return on investment
We live in a video game culture
Large business technology vendors are jumping into the fray
Hardware, software, and networking technology have advanced rapidly
Social networking is a way of life, allowing advocates and implementers to find each other
Investment in short-term Immersive Internet projects in 2009 is both strategic and cash-conscious. Project teams can extract tangible cost savings immediately, influence the vendors in an emerging technology market, and build the expertise needed for making sound larger investments in the future. Look for opportunities to improve business processes in seven main areas: learning and training, meetings and conferences, business activity simulation, collaborative design and prototyping, collaborative 3D data visualization, human resources management, and remote system and facility management.

The enterprise Immersive Internet technology market is made up of three main sectors: platforms, packaged applications, and custom apps. This emerging market is populated primarily by small software vendors and open source projects, making technology selection difficult and risky. The market will undergo significant change during the next five years as startups and educational institutions invent and innovate, large business technology vendors get in the game, and platforms and applications diverge. This may render some early technology implementations throwaways, though the experience gained will prove invaluable.

Long term, think of the Immersive Internet as an area of strategic investment that enables transformation of the way we work as well as business model innovation. The Immersive Internet allows organizations to connect more deeply with customers, partners, and suppliers. It enables business leaders to nourish and harvest human creativity and increase workforce and customer engagement. Ultimately, organizations will go far beyond the seven use cases we outline here and the Immersive Internet will become part of everyday life.

Last Friday the ThinkBalm Innovation Community held its second community brainstorming session. The objective for these sessions: to collaboratively find solutions to problems associated with enterprise adoption of the Immersive Internet. The benefit: address challenges individuals are dealing with while gaining hands-on experience with a variety of immersive environments. One of the ThinkBalm Innovation Community members — Jeff Lowe, an Oklahoma-based consultant and project manager who writes the The Immersive Life blog — “founded” the original idea to hold this brainstorming series. Other community members hopped on board and self-formed an idea team to help evolve Jeff’s original idea. ThinkBalm’s intention is that ThinkBalm Innovation Community members who benefit from these sessions will take the practices they learn and experiences they have back to their own organizations.

For Brainstorming Session #2, eleven community members gathered in Second Life to discuss and propose solutions to a challenge one of the members submitted. The challenge can be summed up as: “What does a ‘believer’ need to do to convince colleagues that the Immersive Internet has business value? What can we do to get through the resistance / dismissiveness some people have to it?” Participants were all affiliated with different organizations. Most had never met each other before this session.

We began the session by introducing ourselves and familiarizing ourselves with a 3D brainstorming tool Jeff Lowe built and an interactive polling tool he provided for our use. We moved through the discussion, communicating with each other via a mix of voice and text chat and adding nodes to a 3D mind map (see Figure 1). As we talked, text chats and entries people were making into the mind mapping tool scrolled by on our screens. By the end of the hour the 3D mind map had about 3 dozen nodes bearing names like “orientation experience,” “games = not work” and “risky training scenarios,” some of which included additional notes.

We’ve learned a few lessons along the way

• IT security concerns are preventing people from gaining valuable experience. Due to IT security restrictions, not everyone can access Second Life (or other immersive environments – sometimes even Web-based ones, if even a small Java download is required) while they’re at work. No matter which immersive environment the ThinkBalm Innovation Community has used for our meetings, there is always someone who can’t participate for this reason. And sometimes even when people can access the immersive environment, they can’t use voice over IP because IT has shut it down. We can always resort to the telephone but this means participants can no longer see who is speaking during the meeting — a benefit of integrated VoIP. And we can always resort to text chat, but this can negatively impact the quantity and quality of communication.
• People without voice communications are at a disadvantage in in-world meetings. While we use voice over IP (e.g., Skype, Second Life, or Microsoft Office Live Meeting 2007) for most of our in-world meetings, we sometimes run into a problem where some participants can’t fully participate because they don’t have microphones, don’t know how to configure their system for VoIP, use Macs (which Microsoft Office Live Meeting 2007 doesn’t support for voice), or have IT organizations that have locked down the use of VoIP. These participants are relegated to the virtual worlds equivalent of the remote meeting attendee who dials in via phone and is represented by the gray box on the meeting room table. They can be forgotten by the meeting participants who are together in a room together (in the physical world) or who have access to VoIP (in the virtual world).
• You think multitasking is bad now . . . It is common for information workers to be talking on the phone at the same time they are taking notes, viewing presentation materials, checking email, or IMing. Our experience during this brainstorming session is that while an immersive environment increases engagement many times over compared to a traditional teleconference or Web conference, the multi-tasking can also be more intense. Participants were listening to the conversation and participating via voice or text chat, navigating their avatars around the room, typing into the chat field to interact with the brainstorming tool, zooming their camera in and out to see the nodes on the mind map more easily, and occasionally viewing a poster containing instructions. This is bound to be easier for people who have played multiplayer video games; but for those who haven’t it can be a real challenge.
• A big question: how to preserve the artifacts of collaboration. Our plan was that after the meeting we would click on each node in the mind map to expand the notes associated with it, and manually create from this a Microsoft Word outline of the meeting for each participant to have. Not a straightforward task. We also took snapshots during the session (see these pictures on Flickr) and one participant made a short movie. Jeff Lowe also created a “read-only” version of the completed mind map for all participants to take away with them. All this is a lot more complicated than simply distributing a Word doc upon conclusion of a traditional meeting. But it was a lot easier to collaborative create our 3D mind map than it would have been to try to have 11 people contribute to the same Word document in real time.
• It’s a big challenge when avatars don’t share peoples’ real names. For this brainstorming session we used Second Life. Second Life residents (with rare exception) do not have the option of having their real names appear over their avatars’ heads. This causes huge problems in the business context when people aren’t familiar with each others’ avatars and avatar names — and can even be an issue when some participants are familiar with each other. Part of the Second Life culture is that people refer to each other in voice and text conversations by their avatar names, which can cause a sort of “split personality” problem in business meetings. In this brainstorming session, the eleven participants had to try to remember not only the real names of the other people in the meeting, but which avatar name matches which person’s name. This distraction detracted significantly from the meeting experience compared to meetings we’ve held in OpenSim, for example, where avatars can share the user’s real name.
• Being able to visualize the conversation helped guide the conversation. At least some of the participants frequently referenced the 3D construct to quickly see which topics were trending and getting the most attention and which were needing more focus and then contributed accordingly.  Most of the time, the construct lagged the voice conversation, but there were times that the contributions to the construct led and redirected the voice conversation.
• 3D brainstorming is a worthwhile way for busy people to spend an hour. At the end of the session we did a quick poll asking for feedback on the session, using the interactive polling tool (see Figure 2). We asked participants to click on the red square to indicate their feedback was “excellent,” the green square for “pretty good,” yellow for “needs tweaking,” and blue for “poor.” As you can see by the red and green columns standing next to the polling machine, all participants felt their hour was well-spent. Here we were, a collection of unaffiliated people with a common interest in progressing enterprise adoption of the Immersive Internet forward. Using an immersive environment and experimental 3D brainstorming tool, real work got done. We generated lots of good ideas that each of us can use in our own work. (For one participant’s experience see this blog article by Richard Hackathorn, Brainstorming virtually.)

Global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company Accenture has 180,000 employees and offices in 49 countries and brings thousands of new employees on board every year. As you might imagine, recruitment in a professional services company this size is a mission-critical business process. Accenture is already quite successful with new college grads — BusinessWeek named the company #8 in “Best Places to Launch a Career in 2007.”  To even more effectively reach what the company thinks of as the “Facebook audience,” in March of 2008 Accenture launched a careers island in Second Life.

The island features fairly traditional-looking reception and meeting spaces designed to “feel like Accenture” and effectively represent the corporate brand in a way that is appropriate in Second Life. Accenture uses the island to network with prospective employees, answer questions job candidates have, and meet candidates that recruiters couldn’t easily get together with otherwise (e.g., students in universities Accenture couldn’t visit on a road show).  The Accenture Careers island also offers a series of interactive games to engage peoples’ minds (e.g., memorize as many details about a complex picture as you can, or calculate the counterbalance required to catapult your avatar onto a landing pad) or encourage teamwork (e.g., balance your avatar on a disk while not knocking other avatars off their disks). Signage is available in six languages. To help Accenture marketing and HR folks easily leverage the island for their recruiting and networking events, the project team developed and distributed “how to” tools, templates (e.g., for marketing communications), and best practices information. There may also be Windows solutions for the above.

Many groups at Accenture had been dabbling in Second Life since the fall of 2006 – like Accenture Technology Labs, the Accenture Media Agency in Milan, and recruitment marketing teams in both France and the U.S.  The Global Recruitment Marketing team, another early experimenter within the company, began to see a pattern in all the little successes and took the lead on assembling the necessary funds and talent to launch an island that could be used company-wide. In late July I spoke with Suzan L. Raycroft in Accenture Global Recruitment Marketing, who shared some insights into why Accenture considers this investment a success so far:

• The centralized investment in the Second Life island paid for itself after 5-6 events. While the company doesn’t disclose the specific results of its marketing programs, it has found “a decent number of” hires through events held in-world. The investment in the island paid for itself after just 5 or 6 networking and recruiting events. (See the related ThinkBalm article, At Microsoft, cost of virtual events about 1/3 the cost of traditional events.) If you think about recruitment at Accenture taking place in 49 countries, and each of these countries using the Accenture Careers island rather than building its own, the cost savings really start to stack up. Also, recruiting becomes more standardized across the regions as people start to use the same materials and processes.
• A critical success factor: a multi-faceted support program for internal users. Accenture has found that most recruiters are not yet comfortable going in-world, finding the candidate they’re supposed to meet with, escorting him or her to a private table, and having a successful text chat. So Global Recruitment Marketing put a lot of effort into making it easy for recruiters to use Second Life. The team holds meetings, calls, and tours with recruiters and created a guide on how to sign up in Second Life, create an avatar, walk, sit, chat, etc. The team sends out regular emails featuring best practices and alerting recruiting staff to new programs or tools. The department’s internal portal has a section dedicated to Second Life where the team posts what countries have done, results, what worked and didn’t, etc.

Accenture, like many other companies, has high hiring targets for tech-savvy people. Candidates display at least a modicum of technical skill if they can create Second Life accounts and relatively professional-looking avatars, find their way to the Accenture Careers island and the specific meeting location, and communicate with the recruiter via text chat or voice. And Second Life allows Accenture to interact with a geographically wide pool of prospective employees. Digital metrics provider comScore found that in March of 2007, 61% of active Second Life residents were from Europe, 19% from North America, and 13% from Asia Pacific.

While not a replacement (yet, anyway) for traditional recruitment techniques, Second Life as a recruiting and interviewing tool is a great enhancement for Accenture. In essence, the company is pre-qualifying its recruitment leads by ensuring that candidates have the needed technical skill and gaining insight into personal style and communication and social skills once a candidate reaches the island. And Second Life allows Accenture to leverage its global resources, recruiting and interviewing around the globe and around the clock.