My pal Tony O’Driscoll asked me to help spread the word about the upcoming 3D Training Learning and Collaboration (3DTLC) conference in Washington DC next month.
Tony is hoping to kick off wide-spread adoption of virtual worlds in the enterprise.
It is very rare to get in on the ground-floor of an emerging industry. It is also somewhat frustrating to be in the thick of it for a few years writhing with impatience for the market to or the technology catch up. The dance between market and technology readiness stair steps its way through predictable peaks of inflated expectations and troughs of disillusionment on one side and eras of ferment followed by dominant design on the other.
My intuition tells me that 2009 is the year that the planets align for Virtual World Enterprise applications to head up the proverbial hockey stick. For years now I have been hearing Virtual World vendors complain that they do not have a legitimate home. At the Serious Games conferences they are marginalized my the more jazzy games. At Training Conferences they are pushed out of the limelight by Instructional Design Approaches and LMS vendors, and, until NOW, at the Virtual Worlds conferences it felt like Entertainment and Media was sucking up the bulk the oxygen. NOT ANYMORE ; )
On the client side (people who are hungry to implement Virtual World Technologies within their enterprises) I have heard an ongoing plea for TANGIBLE EXAMPLES of how Virtual World solutions have solved REAL Business Problems and delivered REAL Business Results.
VIrtual world technology is advancing at a tremendous pace. Both the green movement and the recession are pushing for less physical travel. And Tony is an astute, compelling spokesperson.
Nonetheless, I’m still something of a Luddite in the 3D arena. The difficulty of learning to use a virtual environment is a barrier to wide adoption by corporations. Furthermore, while we’re all grownups here, rumor has it that most participants in Second Life are there for sex, and, as the old college saying warns, it’s unwise to get your meat where you get your bread. I recognize that my experience is limited and that virtual worlds come in many flavors. I’d love to be proven wrong. Feel free to set me straight in a comment.
Let me caution you about going to Tony’s blog to find out more, especially if you are intensely curious about the future. I planned to simply find out a little about the conference and move on. Fat chance. There’s too much good stuff here, for example, this graphic from Chuck Hamilton:
…or this introduction to what Tony’s up to at Fuqua:
Investigating this question takes the tension of topic/content/formal versus task/context/informal we’ve been wrestling with for some time in learning/KM to the next level. It forces us to examine how Web 2.0 impacts the enterprise of the future as we migrate from database centric stocks of tagged explicit knowledge to social computing enabled flows of digitally enabled people with ability to find each other to innovate and problem solve in real time. In short, I am in a hurry to figure out the Enterprise (or Eduprise in my context) 2.0 IT infrastructure looks like…because we need to BUILD IT here at Fuqua by August of next year ; )
As I write this, I’m listening to Tony describe what convinced IBM to invest in the Webolution. Might EverQuest and World of Warcraft be metaphors for how work might function in the future? What would this mean for the IBM brand? What might IBM learn about leadership from games? What sort of leaders might evolve?
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