Business Value in the “Immersive Internet” Explored
Well, this is what it’s all about here at Metaverse For Business. I’m scouring the ‘net looking for fantastic resources and support, or evidence against some of my own beliefs and observations about business in the metaverse. Earlier, I came across a paper released by ThinkBalm that looked into the business value from using immersive Internet technology (aka, virtual worlds) in the work setting. I’m very much into finding quantitative results here and I don’t expect everyone to read the full 36-page report, but I will try to summarize here, those things relative to this blog’s mission.
It came as no surprise that most of the survey respondents it appears, focused on non-financial benefits of using immersive technology for their business needs. This is ok however if you subscribe to the balanced scorecard strategic management school of thought. The balanced scorecard looks at leading indicators (and only one trailing indicator) to try and determine the financial success and strategic alignment of a company’s activities with corporate strategic goals. So if we grabbed a page from the balanced scorecard here, maybe success of immersive Internet technologies can be deemed financially acceptable if it lends to improving internal business processes, or learning and growth performance indicators.
I appologize for the B-school flash back. Let’s get back to more straight forward talk. Obviously this study looked to try and conclude if there was business value, financial or strategic, in using in any way, virtual worlds. The take home message I got from the study was that while there’s signs of value for internal business use, there’s very little applicable or practical value for affecting gross sales (the top line you might say).
What this means to me, is that such immersive technology is part of our growing internal IT costs and investments. I came across a statistic recently (shame on me for not noting it down) that said CIOs and CTOs spend approximately 80% of their capital budgets now on maintenance, hardware, and support contracts, and only 20% is spent on innovation or leading-edge projects. While the ThinkBalm study points out the low cost of implementation of such technology is a benefit, it would certainly be nice to find something that reduces IT expenses, instead of adds to them.
If you are an IT manager, looking for new ways to draw your globally-dispersed teams closer together, immersive technology might be worth experimenting with. It will not replace current web conferencing tools however. Such 2D applications still possess much better collaboration tools and shorter learning curves (as well as require lower-end hardware workstations). But I will continue to explore our metaverse, looking for opportunities to put some figures up against that top line, or if you are a one-person business entrepreneur, help give you some new tools to analyze your business environment.
The full 36-page study can be found at this location.