What is the ROI for virtual world technologies in the workplace? To answer this, ThinkBalm surveyed and interviewed Immersive Internet practitioners . 95% of their projects were deemed successful, contradicting the Gartner 2008 prediction of 10%.
26th May, 2009. ThinkBalm published their new report today to
find out what is the business value of the virtual worlds.
The findings were very interesting and encouraging for the whole
Virtual World industry. Contradicting Gartner's prediction from
2008, where they estimated that 90% of corporation's virtual world projects will
end as failures, instead ThinkBalm found out that 95%
of the projects were seen successful inside companies.
Virtual worlds were mostly used for education, training,
meetings and conferences. These "low hanging fruit" applications
have the lowest expenses to start with. Once a company has virtual
world application experience, it is easier to reach to more complex
use cases later.
Over 40% of the projects were profitable, and over 50% were
expected to turn out profitable during this year. How this compares
to the earlier mentioned 95% success rate? Many of the projects
were not even trying to save costs or make money, but they were
seen as long term investments or as a necessary tools for
collaboration and training.
Maybe the best example of how virtual worlds can provide
something which is not possible otherwise was the mention how they
can be used for catasthropy training for cases that are not
possible to train for in the real world setting: A major explosion
at an oil production facility would be impossible to arrange.
For meetings, virtual worlds were seen as comparable to real
world meetings, and they provided better user experience when
compared to traditional web based collaboration, video meetings and
such. Virtual worlds expenses were also lower in many cases when
compared to traditional tools.
Maxping recommends reading the whole study, as it contained
critical information for successful implementation of a virtual
world project. It contained experiences and notes about possible
pitfalls and problems one may encounter when taking this new
technology in use. ThinkBalm Immersive Internet Business Value Study,
Q2 2009.
We also note that due to ThinkBalm's screening process the study
focussed on Early Adopters, so it is unsurprising that the results
were very positive. At the end of the day if you ask 10 Geeks if
they enjoy being geeky - chances are you will have a fairly high
success rate. What is particularly interesting though is that while
the enterprise focus seems to still be on the "virtual
meetings/reduce costs" scenario - there are other use cases
emerging as outlined in the report.
Finally on a side note... everybody is always worrying about the
"business case" for virtual worlds (which of course is the focus of
this study) - but in fact people often forget the really obvious
(and probably most lucrative in the long run) one *ENTERTAINMENT*.
Maybe the Linden Labs and Habbo's of this world would rather we
didn't pay too much attention to that one. *grins*