Externalisation & Web3D: A Corporate View

In my last post I touched on the subject of virtual reality and the adoption of three-dimensional worlds as a platform for online collaboration. In this post I’d like to share with you my thoughts on this trend, and explore the possibilities this holds for the future of enterprise and personal computing.

You’d be hard pushed to find, in the present day world, the existence of a corporate organisation that does not to some degree depend on an IT infrastructure. My own proclivities on this are often drawn from various media reports which frequently suggest that companies would otherwise fail without a reliable and robust IT infrastructure. A report in the FT, dated 8th September 2008, wrote that the London Stock Exchange came to a complete halt due to an IT system malfunction in the reporting of trades (shares bought and sold). This couldn’t have come at a worst possible time for Britain’s economy; the country was on the verge of its first quarter of negative growth – on the back of a quarter of zero growth – due to the rippling effects of the financial crises across the Atlantic.

What this highlights is the importance (and indeed our dependency) on technology and the services it provides.  We seem to be intrinsically focused on collaborating on a professional level within office buildings connected by local area networks, and this – for the most part – is the reason why enterprise technologies evolve over a longer period of time than personal (home user) technologies. And it’s the agile nature of home computing which has meant that the home user has a more sustainably ubiquitous reach of technology resources.  There are however organisations, such as Serena Software, who (for example) are leading the way by bucking that trend. Serena Software has adopted Facebook as its corporate intranet, and by doing so has shown that users don’t need to be office-based just to gain the benefits of accessing corporate data – some might argue that the use of VPN is an equivalent technology, however to implement VPN within a large organisation would result in resource costs which would otherwise be avoided by incorporating freely available web-applications. Taking this forward there exist a multitude of tech firms which have created web-based versions of everyday desktop applications – such as Google Docs, OpenOffice, and webERP – and this shift in communication is well documented in the book Lost in Translation, by Carl Bate and Nigel Green, in which it calls this trend externalisation. The book goes on to provide clear direction on the benefits of implementing web-based applications in a corporate environment and also discusses such benefits in guidance with the VPEC-T methodology.

Taking this concept further imagine, if you will, entering an office building and finding your way to your desk. You then sit down and log onto your personal computer, before setting up your phone and checking your emails. A fairly standard approach to the working day, however what if you did this in a virtual environment? And what if all of your colleagues did this too? All in the same office building, essentially replicating what happens in the real world but in the confines of a software environment. If indeed this were to be the case then in an instant there would be astronomical savings on diverse platforms resulting in varying degrees of effectiveness.  Online games such as Second Life have propelled the concept of online collaboration by improving communication, productivity, and customer/client interaction. And this level of immersion within virtual environments will only get deeper as Web3D becomes more prominent within web-application development.

Combining the concept of externalisation with the evolution of web3D will change the face of business – it’s not a matter of if – as it’s only a matter of time. What I expect to see happening, certainly within the next year, is a greater – more widespread – use of IM applications which will later combine other technologies such as video conferencing and file-sharing, and the only real issue holding this back is how this can be properly audited. An extreme example of what IM could look like in the future –when combined with a web-based virtual world – is the internet start-up Club Cooee. Club Cooee is the world’s first three-dimensional IM application based on a Second Life style virtual world – I encourage you to have a look at this see and see for yourself the potential this sort of technology could have in commerce.

I’d be interested in reading your visions of where this could all lead.

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Web 2.0 gone, matrix 1.0 follows... # Posted By matt | 2/17/09 3:48 AM

Matrix 1.0 sounds interesting - would you care to share more information on it? # Posted By Sham Mitra | 2/18/09 5:04 PM