Notes from Virtual Worlds Expo: Dr. Colin Parris' Keynote

In the keynote for the second day of the Virtual Worlds Expo Erica Driver of ThinkBalm interviewed Colin J. Parris, Ph.D., Vice President, Digital Convergence, IBM Research.  Parris talked about IBM's work in bringing other businesses to virtual worlds and its own technology development.

• On brining Aviva, though the process seems to apply generally, Parris says there are 4 steps: "We have a list of don'ts first, things you may as well do in 2D." Then they go through the list of dos before heading into development: "That's the great thing about working in virtual worlds. You can do the mock up, get feedback like 'Those colors don't represent our brands,' and change very quickly." Finally the company moves into deployment and hosting.
• On yesterday's Lotus Sametime 3-D announcement: You have to have two levels of integration. THe first is technological with all of the other IT assets, but "The second is much more cultural. If I show users this is a brand new tool they need to learn to use, that doesn't work. You have to make it fit the culture and process." All of IBM, said Parris, uses Lotus Sametime and Notes, so now they're looking at how to use 3D for their own purporses.
• On bringing Second Life servers behind the IBM firewall: "The focus there was on two things. One, to create an environment where you’d have a measure of security. Those secure regions would be protected. The second would be to have a private, secure reason while being able to move quickly to the Second Life Gird, which was very interesting to some our clients.
  
  "Part of what we’ve been doing is working with internal IBM clients. Technologically we’ve had some great success. The true measure is business value. This is really a pilot we’re doing with Linden, but I think this is very promising."
• On the value of interoperability, which IBM has worked to organize both a large consortium around and specifically with Second Life and OpenSim: "If I think about it, two things come to mind. The notion of the enterprise is really about the event. It’s not totally connected to the platform. I’m going somwhere because there’s a training session. If the session is in Second Life I need to be there. If it’s in There.com, I need to be there. If my client is in OpenSim, I need to be there.
  
  "At some point if I have to build an avatar in every environment, you have to think about investment protection. Also, if you build capabilities in one environment, you want to take those with you. We also have assets we’ve built in CAD programs that we’d love to use.  Clients are literally sitting on trillions of dollars of assets and they need to be able to use those."
• On where we are: "In terms of enterprise, we’re still very early. That’s where we need to look at the business value. For the company to extract value, they need to say, ‘This is about the experience.’ What I feel good about, though, is that there is a social revolution happening here as well. It’s easy to track the number of millennials in the workforce. About 88 million are in the workforce, and they’re going to push things along in interesting ways. Before we’d push this technology out there and sell it to companies themselves. Now we’re seeing groups inside of companies and they’re beginning to build on their own. It’s a lot better for us. I couldn’t give you a date, though. I believe it’s going to happen; I just couldn’t tell you then."
• On hurdles to adoption: “The first we’ve got to get over is this business value. We need to get some great case studies with real ROI. […] There’s a list of metrics we need to produce and a list of business cases we need to harden. The second is around these standards. That’s going to be key. If you do have the business value, you can still be blocked with the IT shops. They don’t want anything that’s not stable or standard. The third is along the liens of these security issues. If things are secure and you fear nothing, that’s the norm. If there’s one major problem, everyone gets worried very quickly. We saw the raft of problems that McAfee posted. We’ve got to find a way to address that.”

Comments

[mcfly]

Wow. Who makes this stuff anyways? Who uses this stuff?
Do they really use it in offices?
Im a street worker so Im totaly
clueless to the office environment. ANd your conference
is too expensive and you dont
even have a virtual component,
with a live cam for example.
SEFEATs the PURPOSE.

[mbob]

What are the attendance numbers?

+1 on the query about why no virtual version. I mean, really, would that have been such a stretch?