Category: ThinkBalm Reports

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.