I was recently chatting with a colleague about the Internet social community of Second Life and the affect that a multiuser paradigm of avatar and simulation technologies could have on the workplace (such as, in collaboration, teaming, communicating and coordinating). My colleague's slightly haughty response was, "Wow, you have a lot of time on your hands to play video games, Betsy! I have real work to get done."

OK, OK, I am not suggesting spending all day on Internet gaming or checking out myspace or YouTube; but if you are focused on supporting user-driven applications, then you need to find ways to stay in-tune with and ahead of what your users are using at home, because sooner or later (good, bad or ugly) they are going to ask you to support this type of paradigm in the workplace.

By now, most of us have figured out that consumer technologies are having - and will continue to have — a significant impact on how we work and how we support people in our business workplace. Increasingly, users are driving adoption of instant messaging, videoconferencing, search-style interfaces for finding information, and visualization and dashboards for accessing business data - to name a few.

However, it isn't going to stop there. In fact, plan for these demands to increase. As more of the "next" generation enters the workforce and more of the "boom" generation adopts consumer technologies, IT and business must be ready for an ever-increasing demand for applications, interfaces, devises and tools that support how users really want to work (see "Key Reasons Why You Should Consider a 'Learning by Gaming' Strategy").

So, how are you going to get ready for these users? Play more! This year, dedicate 1% to 3% of your work week to playing with consumer technologies — that is, Internet games, hand-held devices, online media sites and Internet publishing systems. Find out what technologies your users are using at home for entertainment or for personal productivity. Know these technologies and become familiar with their strengths and weaknesses so that you are ready to discuss their use (good and bad) in your organization.

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I am very concerned about all the hype around Second Life? It's Dungeons and Dragons for a minority of users. If it weren't not promoted by IBM, it would be dying a very rapid death.

Please write about things I can actually share with my CIO, this sort of advice is best left to Avatar Weekly or Loser Times.

I can't agree more with the 'spend x% of your week on consumer technologies'. Anyone with eyes open can see the driving force is no longer businesses, but consumers (or war) when it comes to technology updates.
Intersting to follow the Second Life progress from a sub-surface information processing perspective (yes, oil). Second Life code is now open source. Will the open source community overcome the drawbacks of the current architecture around second life? If so, will this open up the arena to allow more creative and accurate (therefore less costly to the business) ways of simulating drilling wells and pumping reservoirs?
If so, the small percentage of time a company uses to follow initiatives like this will have incredible impact on the bottom line.
For years sub-surface visualisation has been benefitting off the back of gaming technologies' pushing the video-card envelope. Will we see a deepening of "gaming" impact into other areas of business?
I think so.

As with you, I am wary about market hype around any particular gaming-type technology – including Second Life. In addition, I am equally wary about the business impact and value of virtual reality worlds. But the reality is there are people using a diverse set of gaming-style technologies, devices, social networking paradigms and networked virtual environments (NVEs) like SL, which is an early form of 3D collaboration. Even if we find them of little immediate value beyond play, these gaming-style technologies are influencing how people think and what people are interested in. You may rightly decide that they have no place in your work environment or in the hands of your users. However, the biggest change that environments like this suggest is that multi-player environments are becoming more commonplace. To make decisions on how these environments will or will not impact your organization – we need to become educated as to their strengths and challenges.

Please, don’t misunderstand, I am not suggesting you spend anywhere close to the majority of your time understanding gaming or any other consumer technologies. But, if we want to be empowered as IT leaders to guide users (and CIOs) to make good decisions within our organizations, we better know and become conversant in these games, communications modes and devices.

Betsy I agree with your take on the overall value of gaming as it applies to business. I am not much of a gamer, but my children are and I am constantly astounded by what I see. Just recently I sat and watched my son as he played one of the many online shoot-em-up games. I watched as he rapidly collaborated with has ad hoc team, formulated an overall strategy, developed tactical objectives, and then executed the plan. He did this without ever meeting the rest of his team. What struck me most was the fluidity with which this process was accomplished. I would challenge any corporate IT staff to show me a system that encouraged this type of rapid planning and execution. Given the same scenario we would still be sending emails, or posting into a Lotus Notes database for discussion.

The gaming world has made a science of online collaboration and interactive interfaces. I believe that if the enterprise application vendors spent a little bit more time understanding the innovation that is taking place in this space, that they would produce much more intuitive and useful applications.

Second Life appears to have only 300k+ active users out of the 6 million who subscribed (out of curiosity I asume).

We can learn from the gaming scene, which is huge. But Second Life is not more than a thin online 'the Sims' concept.

I don't agree with second life as a good example, but I do agree with the ever increasing divide between old world and new world.

The baby boomers need to keep up with modern technologies or risk alienating younger employees and clients. Spending some time keeping up with what is new is a good idea.

I totally agree with Betsy on this topic. Internet games, hand-held devices, online media sites and Internet publishing systems are evolving too fast and drawing more and more people these days. We can hardly keep up what technologies your users are using at home for entertainment or for personal productivity.

Kevin-j,

http://www.virtela.com

The last blog post is dated 15 February 2007. Is this because there isn't much going on in the HPW topic area? That, I can hardly believe ;)? Or is the HPW topic itself not catching on.. just curious.

Frodo