• It’s a Virtual World
Booz Allen has a tremendously informative website called Strategy+Business, and a weekly newsletter.
A recent article describes how companies are leaving the physical world behind to cut costs, improve communication, and find new ways to collaborate. The author describes a virtual meeting with Kearney from IBM, conducted in Second Life. Kearney was in Arizona, and the writer was at her desk in New York.
Virtual platforms exist on the Internet and an estimated 300 million people worldwide have registered for participation in some form of this activity. Although mostly pigeonholed by the media and even the digerati as just another way to social network, almost completely neglected was the value of the virtual world as a tool for business.
For someone interested in telework, for example, bringing together global workforce instantly at any time, offers an opportunity for far-flung teams to share and pore over findings, conducting sophisticated simulations, and training new recruits at a fraction of the cost of in-person sessions.
IBM estimates that, with an investment of roughly $80,000, it saved more than $250,000 in travel and venue costs for a recent corporate Academy of Technology event and enjoyed more than $150,000 in additional productivity gains, because these virtual participants were at their computers and able to dive back into work immediately at the conclusion of the meeting. Today some 6,000 IBMers are linked in virtual worlds.
The employment search firm Manpower Inc. began using Second Life in 2007 to reach and organize people who had already been initiated into the virtual world. Thousands of visitors and job seekers from more than 50 countries have already experienced avatar-to-avatar communication through employment fairs, live events, and seminars.
The need to cut travel, training, and meeting costs, gain substantial access to global talent, trim back internal redundancy, and increase communications among departments that were once isolated from one another will force organizations to find new ways (and new worlds) to do old tasks.
If you want to work from hone and telecoomute, you’re the winner.
April 26th, 2009 at 1:04 pm
Just found your site a little while ago. Looks very interesting, I learned some important things. Gretta