When I think most of us are in a TN frame of mind we tend to think of virtual worlds as only games or social spaces. The concept of work when it does come into play tends to do so in the sense of its traditional boundaries being challenges by a shift in the consumer / producer divide or in the sense that is is entailed by the pracitice of gold farming.
So here in a bit of a novel and experimental move for us is an essay on the subject of the Virtual Office by Andrew W. Donoho who is Web Theorist in the bit of IBM they like to call Emerging Technology. Responses to to the questions that Andrew poses and the very inclusion of the discussion of the virtual office as a topic on TN are welcome.
The Virtual Office: A Holy Grail or Attainable 'Reality'?
The virtual office (VO) is a dream of human interface/virtual system researchers for many years now. Yet, the VO seems as far away as ever. Yes, we have hours of entertainment in fabulous virtual worlds, such as the World of Warcraft, Second Life and others. But how do we transition out of the entertainment spaces and “get some work done” in VOs?
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In my day job as an emerging technologist for IBM, I see the misapplication of technology to the human problems of organizations all of the time. Therefore, since the technologies for building VOs are now being commercialized by Second Life and others, I ask myself if it is going to be different this time? My analysis starts with performing an inventory of technologies and workplace challenges. I then offer a simple economic scenario for implementing a VO. A description of the social issues precluding VO acceptance is next. And I conclude by soliciting the opinions of Terra Novans on the problem.
- High performance, commodity priced graphics hardware.
- High resolution screens.
- Pervasive, low cost motion video cameras.
- Modest broad bandwidth connections.
- Second Life as a sample VO construction toolbox.
- Effective network office infrastructure (Web, IM, email, etc.)
- Lead, overwhelmingly obvious application that VO solves.
- Low cost alternatives.
- Networked Abstract Office v. Virtual Office.
- Social structure of business life.
- Boundary between the personal space and business space.
- Company culture.
- Training.
- What else, if anything, do you think is a technology prerequisite for a VO?
- Does my communication centric view really trump the technology driven approach?
- If not energy, then what would prompt the creation of a VO? (Bird flu is too transitory, in my opinion, to cause the investments.)
- What, if anything, do you think should be added to the social analysis?
- Do you agree that the social structure of business is probably the biggest impediment to VO adoption?
- And, of course, what suggestions do Terra Novans have for me as I navigate this application area?
Technology Inventory:
The above list is a pretty standard inventory of the state of broadly deployed technologies. I include Second Life because it is available, has a demonstrated track record of being able to support office level avatar densities and has an open architecture. Because this list is not terribly controversial, I will not examine it further in this post.
Rational Workplace Challenges:
Because the decision to implement a virtual office is made by businesses and not individuals, it will frequently start with the above 'rational' issues before proceeding to the softer social issue examined below.
Social 'Drag' - the resistance to novel organization of social systems.
Social drag will slow and frequently stop much innovation in organizations. It can only be overcome by the steady application of sound micro-economic logic of business savings over time. Let us look at logic.
Rational Workplace Challenges:
The 'killer' or traction application is normally where these kinds of analyses both start and stop. I contend that there is no specific application that a VO solves that will call it into being. A VO is a systemic economic entity that reduces costs so much that it overcomes objections to its use.
Therefore, the VO has to offer a better economic solution than the reigning paradigm of the Networked Abstract Office (NAO). The NAO is that collection of technologies that we use for the day to day communication and control of our various business activities - phone, email, web browsing, IM and, to a much lesser extent, blogging. This office exists in the participant's minds and they navigate it relatively well. Bearing in mind that most NAO users only use the most rudimentary capabilities of their tools, the productivity of the interpersonal communication they enable overwhelms the cost of deploying many of these over engineered technologies. Since many of these tools will be common between a NAO and a VO, they will not be a differentiating factor. Yes, they may be represented differently in a VO but, because humans have already adapted to using NAO tools, they will not offer much economic advantage. Emerging from this analysis is the very clear idea that the VO is a superset of the NAO.
But what kind of superset? Is it an avatar based world? A 2 and 1/2 dimensional view of a desktop? What is the real roll of a first person perspective in an office setting? I think all of these questions are improperly technology driven. Office life and productivity enhancement is about communication. Therefore, any VO is going to have to have rich communication at its heart. Because of the pervasive availability of motion video cameras and broadband, I think the real driver will be the deep integration of live video of the VO participants. Anyone who has seen a multi-person demo of Apple's iChat AV senses the power of this kind of integration. Yet, it is still reasonably difficult to set up a multi-person AV chat.
Therefore, my lead scenario for calling a VO into being is as follows. As a response to an energy crisis, large organizations wishing to avoid compensating employees for travel to offices will put in place the server infrastructure to host home office employees in a VO. As this proves successful, in a positive feedback loop, employers will start shifting more of their employees to home offices and releasing high priced office space. The savings to organizations is large - avoided employee raises to compensate for increased transportation energy costs and the reduction in rent for mundane office facilities. These avoided costs dwarf the costs for high priced, high bandwidth networks into homes, fancy VO capable desktop PCs and supporting servers. The savings are there. The precipitating event to cause businesses to reevaluate this situation has not yet occurred. Furthermore, there are no products currently available which implement a workable VO. The pieces are there. Will anyone put them together?
Social 'Drag':
Humans like other humans. They like being near them, going to lunch, conversing and working together. In this regard, the VO starts with a real disadvantage. Since I am a home office worker, I have intimate familiarity with the feelings of isolation that can occur without daily human connections. There is a social structure of office life that humans benefit from. (I get my social outlets elsewhere but I can easily see this as a large scale problem if VOs get established.) While a VO can address this isolation somewhat, a VO is starting out with a huge hurdle to acceptance. This is very different than entering a virtual world (VW) for entertainment. Presumably you see people at school or your real office and the VW is a temporally limited affair with impressive eye candy, modest engaging puzzles and social chat. A VO would be your daily grind (and not in the sense of how many mobs you kill today). The social structure of business life is a serious impediment to VO adoption.
There is also the problem of the boundary between personal space, e.g. your home office, and your formal business space. While I am odd that I invite business people over to my home office often for meetings, I expect most people would not do so. Therefore, the VO has an opportunity to migrate formal space into the virtual realm. To keep it separate from the personal realm. Because of the tight video integration, there will be some leakage between the spaces. (For example, I used to have a cockatiel that would squawk during teleconferences.) This problem is manageable but we will also have to recognize that many employees do not have dedicated home workspaces. There will be some appropriate employee pushback on shifting these home office costs onto employee shoulders.
Company culture is very difficult to overcome. For example, many large companies have very advanced teleconference centric culture. This culture has developed over years of having geographically far flung venues. This culture is somewhat of a culture shock to new employees. In contrast, many companies still 'live under one roof'. Their culture requires face to face meetings. A teleconference is not a 'real meeting'. I have had to frequently fly in to their site to, in fact, cause folks to meet deadlines. These cultures are durable. A VO can probably pretty easily take root in a teleconference culture company but whither in a face to face culture company. Therefore, VOs will probably first start being deployed by large companies.
Finally, training is a real cost. It is one of the major reasons that most organizations do not use most of the features in their current suite of office productivity tools. Fortunately, VOs should be able to leverage the rapid learning features demonstrated in virtual world systems. But, this will be a real objection from the social realm driven by real costs. We cannot ignore them.
Summary:
The odds are against any VO actually getting deployed and used. Yet, the technical and infrastructure pieces are basically in place to make VOs broadly available. The integration of live video is probably the last required piece of technology to make VOs possible. There is an economic case to be made for their deployment but is lacking a precipitating event to start the shift. The social drag slowing and stalling acceptance will be huge. In other words, like office productivity tools themselves, a VO may take upwards of 20 years for our society to figure out how to use it.
Questions for the Terra Nova Community:
