August 31, 2007
Game Play in the Enterprise
This is my first post to the Virtual Worlds blog so let me start by introducing myself. My name is Greg Pelton, I've been at Cisco for 10 years and I lead the Technology Center. Now that we have that out of the way, let's talk about collaboration. Collaboration is critical for successful businesses and the premise of this blog is that Virtual Worlds have a role to play in enabling enterprise collaboration. Let's explore that idea by looking at two examples of Virtual Worlds - Second Life and World of Warcraft - and how they support collaboration.
Meeting vs Collaborating in Virtual Worlds
Second Life (SL) is an extremely powerful environment, with great flexibility and unlimited options. After a team meeting in SL today I had a chance to wander around a shopping area looking for new clothes for my avatar. There were a wealth of things I could buy in SL and in many ways it was a better shopping experience than in real life. Along the way I ran into other avatars and had an opportunity to meet new people, but I didn't really feel compelled to interact. I've also attended scheduled events within SL, for instance a Cisco new product launch. Here I met other people who shared similar interests to me and we had nice discussions about Cisco products or even avatar clothing. However meeting isn't collaborating. I don't find Second Life a very satisfying environment for collaborating and this comes down to what is missing in SL. One thing that is missing is Game Play.
I consider myself a casual gamer, not in the sense of exclusively playing Casual Games, rather that I enjoy playing games casually or occasionally. Real life intrudes often enough that I can't devote the time or energy to become a Hardcore Gamer. I often play World of Warcraft or WoW and I find it a much better environment for collaboration than is Second Life. In fact if you just sit back and watch avatars in WoW, you'll immediately see examples of collaborative behavior.
So what does this creature have to do with collaboration? First you need to strip away the fact that the character looks like a Frankencow and think of it as just an avatar. In WoW (we can use WoW as a proxy for any of the good MMORPGs) your avatar is given a set of tasks to complete. You can solicit help from others who share that same task by sending a message to your organization, or you can travel to the location where that task takes place and meet others who have the same assignment. You are allowed to form ad hoc groups to work on the task and once you complete the task together, you will all share in the reward. This is where meeting becomes collaboration - the combination of co-location and common goals and shared rewards. It is the Game Play of WoW that determines these three factors and, ultimately, which promotes collaboration. Game Play has many other elements including navigation and conflict, but for now let's focus on just these three.
I use the term "tasks" rather than "quests" or "missions" deliberately because I think there is an analogue in the enterprise. In business we are assigned tasks constantly and accomplishing these tasks is one of the key reasons we continue to draw a paycheck. The challenge before us then is how to define the Game Play in a virtual world so that it represents tasks that are relevant to the enterprise and generates rewards that are relevant to our MBOs and careers.
Like most other companies, Cisco has a lot of rules that govern what we do and how we do it. The more frequently used rules are captured in what is formally called Business Processes and these business processes are either deeply embedded in the default behavior of the organization or captured and facilitated by various systems and tools developed by the IT department. In order to have productive collaboration in an enterprise Virtual World, we need to incorporate Game Play rules that reflect the business processes of the enterprise. How are we going to achieve this without hiring armies of consultants and if we are successful, how are we going to link this back into the operations of the enterprise? I think this is an important issue and I haven't seen a lot of study on topic so far.
What do you think?
Posted by Greg Pelton at 06:04 AM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
August 28, 2007
Why play in the Virtual World schoolyard?
One of the first questions I'm typically asked when I show people various aspects of Virtual Worlds, besides "what's that?", is "why would I use that?". It's a fair question and one that I can't always provide a direct, succinct answer. Sure, I have a list of 4-5 bullet-points I could rattle off (collaboration, serendipity, distributed teamwork, etc.), but recently I keep coming back to a quote I read several years ago from Juniper's CEO Scott Kriens. I don't recall the exact wording, but it was around the time that Juniper was beginning to win a few deals (before the Cisco CRS-1) and other "Gigabit Router" companies were announcing their intentions. When asked if he was concerned about those companies, he said "..no, because the only way you really learn in this market is to be out on the playground."
As we've learned from technologies in the past, instead of staying in the classroom and theorizing about new behaviors, we've got our play clothes on and we're seeing what it takes to make the merry-go-round go faster and the teeter-totter go up and down. Not only have we build an impressive and active presence in Second Life, but we're using Network Virtual Environments internally as well. So what are some of the early lessons we're learned? I don't want to give away the farm, but here's a few that we hadn't expected:
- We hold all team meetings in Virtual Worlds. It took a little bit of convincing to get people to adopt the new technologies, but we learned alot about how to clarify its value to a broad group of people (hint: cool technology isn't it) and how to narrow our focus for input and improvement.
- While it's not a face-to-face meeting, or a Cisco Telepresence, the visualization of seeing other participants in a space should not be overlooked. People like to know that there are others listening, participating or engaged at the other end of the wire. It tends to keep you engaged in the conversation instead of having numerous distractions at your desk.
- Since we get some visual indication of who is speaking, or about to speak, the flow of the discussion is alot smoother and people tend to not talk over one other. Just eliminating the "can you repeat that?" and "I'm sorry, you go ahead" from meetings saves alot of aggravation.
- Viewing lists of information isn't helping me with the information overload. Being able to view it in 3D, walk around it, see it from different angles, and see the indirect linkage between it.....now that brings a whole new element to "Knowledge Management".
We obviously don't have all the answers to the question of "why would I use that?", but being on the playground is giving us alot of experience, scars and stories to tell.
Posted by Brian Gracely at 01:57 PM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
August 23, 2007
Gaming your job - Will it be adopted?
An interesting area of study is the motivational factors behind Collaborative Environments. In looking into this, we started looking at how Online Gaming, specifically Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) and Virtual Worlds create environments that motivate the players to actively participate and collaborate with others.
Some of the things we've learned are that there are several main motivations for users to engage in these activities:
1) Achievement - provides goals, challenge, reward, analysis of complex problems, and status
2) Competition - provides challenge, success, reputation, ego and status
3) Socialization - provides a way to help others, create friendships/relationships, collaboration, group-wide enthusiasm for a task, communication channels
4) Exploration - allows discovery of new information/ideas, distraction and escapism
5) Immersion - allows customization of the user or environment, allows personalized style
Some of these elements are also discussed in this article, Using game design to build the next Digg or Flickr
When we look at most corporate collaboration environments, they often lack many of these elements. The problem is that adding many of these elements are often deemed to potentially invade privacy or require too much input from end-users that may not feel properly motivated to participate.
So the challenge is finding creative ways to incorporate motivational factors into our Collaborative Environments such that users feel a need to engage with them and clearly understand the benefit they get (and the company gets) from their participation.
I'll throw out a few examples of interesting motivational techniques that I've heard about recently:
Achievement - Several companies have deployed blogs to allow their employees to discuss topics that are relevant to their jobs or areas of interest. The blogging software allows other people to "rate" the content of the posts, similar to the way people rate books or movies on Amazon.com. Periodically, a group within the company will pick the top rated 1 or 2 posting and have them highlighted on the companies internal web portal (e.g. CEC). This provides wide peer recognition as well as encouragement to others to get actively engaged with the tool.
Productivity - Most of suffer from the problem of email overload, and the hassles of constantly having to maintain your Inbox or deal with Inbox quota problems. We also suffer from the problem of trying to keep up with long threads where people embed comments within the previous email. One way to help relieve some of this burden is by deploying blogs to serve as the discussion forums previously served by mail aliases. Now instead of sending an email to the "virtualworld-interest" alias, a user would post their question/comment/experience on the virtualworld-interest blog space. The space is RSS (Really Simple Syndication) enabled, so users can subscribe to the content as it dynamically updates. So as new responses and comments are posted to the original comment, several side benefits (to many users) occurs:
1) The conversation is captured in a single space, that is searchable, taggable and grouped in conversation format.
2) The updates can be published to other interested users via RSS, in near real-time. These RSS "feeds" can be read through any RSS reader, such as the Attensa RSS plugin for Outlook.
3) Users email Inbox are not bombarded with questions and replies (and replies and replies), so they have less to manage in terms of maintaining their Inbox.
So Blogs + RSS = Less Email in Inbox + Less Email Storage for Company + Searchable Discussions + Collaborative Knowledge for the Company
Socialization - Within TechCenter, one of the areas we're looking at is Virtual Worlds and how this visually rich, immersive environment could help create more robust collaborative environments. While we are driving Cisco's presence in Second Life, we're also using Virtual Worlds to conduct all of our team meetings. The benefits of this include:
1) Being able to see all team members visually (from 8 locations), giving a sense of team participation.
2) Being able to visually see who is talking, which seems to help avoid alot of the overlapping conversations that happen on audio calls.
3) "Seeing" the meeting, as opposed to hearing the meeting (WebEx, Meetingplace) keeps you more focused on the activity and less inclined to drift to other desktop activities.
We're just starting to learn how to harness the power of this technology, but it's already given us more productivity meetings than we've had in the last 6-9 months on the project.
Those are just a few examples of motivations for getting users to adopt new Collaboration Environments. I'd love to hear your examples (good or bad, big or small) of ways that your teams have been motivated to adopt these new technologies
Posted by Brian Gracely at 01:31 PM Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)
Making 'Over the Network' better than 'Over the desk'
In 1998, when we were building the original Cisco IP Phones, we spent a lot of time talking about 'better than' features that would improve the voice communication experience over the standard PSTN/PBX voice model. At the time, we ran into an established hardware chain that didn't support wideband handsets, DSPs without G.722 support, and so on.
We are at the same point in Networked Virtual Environments today, with a few caveats.
When you communicate or collaborate over the desk with someone, you benefit from four of your five senses. You can see them, hear them, smell them, and shake their hand. Generally, I try not to use my sense of taste in meetings, unless it's sampling the local coffee.
When you have an 'over the wire' or 'over the network' interaction, you use fewer senses. Lets summarize the pros and cons for now, and some possible technology opportunities to address the shortcomings:
Sight- You can still see the other party (albeit as they want to be perceived, not as they physically may appear), but not their body language. This is a big disadvantage, as we have all read the studies that say how much non-verbal behavior contributes to person-to-person interactions. This is a drawback. This is a feature that Telepresence offers (high quality video, visibility of the other party's body language) that is better than NVEs.
What can we do to address this? Well, we can intrusively interject biometrics/affective sensors to determine mood or disposition and have that trigger animation overrides, wire up algorithms to your webcam to mirror facial queues, and develop pleasing animations triggered on your force of impact on the keyboard and the amplitude and pacing of your voice (as is done today in call centers to detect angry customers). That'd be a good start, but obviously nowhere near as 'signal rich' as an over the desk interaction.
There is still some opportunity to leverage 3D displays when those technologies mature.
Touch- Keyboard and Mice. Until we get better sensors and force-feedback gloves, we have the industrial-age keyboard and same old mouse. I have a drawer full of nifty I/O devices that I hope will one-day supplant the keyboard/mouse duo, but the applications and user interfaces are a direct byproduct of the I/O devices in use.
It will be fun when we can reach across the virtual table and shake each others hand, and feel it.
Smell- Nothing we can do here, but I do recall a 'smell over IP' company at either Interop or Macworld in the early 1990s. Perhaps someone smart acquired those patents. ;-)
Hearing- Same as or better than. I can have spatial, wideband audio in a Second Life meeting today. Why is this better? I can get the same audio experience of an in-person meeting but across a broad geography. This makes a ton of difference in the overall experience, as any early-adopter of SL voice can attest.
So where is the better than given these disadvantages? It's in achieving your overall goal quicker, with the right people, information, and context.
Because this is an electronically mediated interaction, we could augment the interaction with another person in ways that are infeasible to do in-person. You could record entire meetings like you can with TiVo and television, and mine that data for later decisions or content. You could have documents, websites, media, past meetings, in orbit around your virtual table to support the decision or conversation at hand.
You could also easily create and interact with 3D models of data, which is very useful in those instances we have all run into when your 2D spreadsheet or presentation has a lossy impact on the topic at hand.
You could mine the metadata of the conversation and recommend people that need to be present at the conversation that aren't there (the local subject matter expert, perhaps?).
These are the areas that need the most attention, in my opinion. We have the tools now, recommendation engines, inference engines, and need to apply those to our collaboration modalities. There is some great work being done in academia right now including the MIT Media Lab, Eurecom, and Coventry University's Serious Games Institute along these lines, which will help accelerate the 'better than' of these environments.
Posted by Christian Renaud at 10:36 AM Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)
August 22, 2007
How to 'Engage'
Mitch Wagner at Information Week is one of those rare technology writers who can step back from a new topic and provide some perspective. In his recent article "Five Rules For Bringing Your Real-Life Business Into Second Life', he crisply articulates the secret sauce for what differentiates a useful presence in Second Life to an empty island, with an emphasis on 'Engaging'.
He gave us more credit than we are due in his article, as we are all still learning, but he did mention how we re-tooled our presence in Second Life to make it more about talking with people than talking at people. This, for us, is 'Engaging'.
When we originally entered Second Life (officially in December 2006) we were like many companies with toes in the water. We had two islands that were segregated between marketing and products on one island, and training, support, Networking Academy, our Executive Briefing Center, and the Cisco Technology Center buildings on the other.
We had planned to do a gradual rollout of new content and some interaction, however the experience of participating quickly changed our direction. By April, we had redesigned our presence in SL, added four islands, and had the governance and infrastructure in place within our company to scale for the foreseeable future.
The first aspect, the redesign, was in direct response to how our customers, partners. Second Life Cisco User Group and employees told us they wanted to use our 'Virtual Campus'. We did away with buildings for the most part so avatars could get in and out easier, and adopted a user-centric model of navigation, so users could decide where they wanted to go (products, training, technology, building in the sandbox) and get quickly there.
We spent most of our time thinking about how to best engage with visitors to the virtual campus, so we created many spaces for 1:1 interaction, 1:few, and many:many. This is the primary use of the campus, to have the conversations that result in shared benefit.
We also added infrastructure for our own employees entering SL, with two more employee islands with a company store, orientation area, internal meeting rooms, and so forth. This gave employees a safe place to experiment without fear of looking foolish (and naked) in front of customers.
The second part was the governance and infrastructure within our company. We have custom avatar creation tools for employees with our own 'code of conduct' agreement, an internal Wiki for employees to share learnings, internal blogs, mail lists, an avatar directory that can be linked to an employee's corporate directory page, and so on.
We also recognized that this technology is as organizationally-agnostic as our corporate website, Cisco.com, so we created a 'stakeholders meeting' of vested parties to participate in the governance and operations of our presence in Second Life, and to avoid the 'tragedy of the commons' and disorder that has plagued other large sites. Each group within Cisco, from product groups to training to human resources, meets to discuss how to best use this technology to amplify their dialog with our customers and partners.
So Captain Picard's 'Engage' order was actually multiple orders, as it was:
- Engage with your customers and partners. Talk with them, not at them.
- Engage with your employees. Teach them how this tool can be used.
- Engage your company. This technology has great opportunities if you engage broadly within your organization.
As I said at the beginning of this post, we are all still learning. Cisco has as much to learn as any company, despite our prior experience in IP Communications and Collaboration technologies. We look forward to learning together with you during this exciting time.
Posted by Christian Renaud at 02:32 PM Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)
August 15, 2007
A Warm Welcome
Welcome to the newest addition to the blog family at cisco.com, Virtual Worlds!
The term 'Virtual Worlds' can be a bit misleading, which is why you'll see the term 'Networked Virtual Environments' in our blog description. We believe that these environments offer an excellent new tool in our collaboration toolbox, alongside established technologies like IP Telephony, Web Collaboration, and Telepresence. They also offer a number of new opportunities to collaborate in ways we haven't had before, which is intuitively obvious to those who use them regularly, but we'll work on enumerating in future blogposts.
We encourage you to experiment with these environments, starting with Cisco's virtual campus in Second Life, a virtual environment created by a San Francisco startup Linden Lab. Second Life uses geographic bookmarks, called 'landmarks', which can directly teleport you to a location in Second Life. If you have Second Life installed, click here to be taken to our virtual campus. Don't be surprised if you see a number of other people there, as we have virtual events regularly such as our recent Networkers at Cisco Live! Be sure to check our upcoming event boards around the virtual campus and join us!
You've probably noticed that we opted for a simple blog format as we get started, and will be adding more bling as we get going. We have already created a del.icio.us group that contains the links from our blogposts for easy reference.
Last but not least, a note about the authors of the blog. We are the Networked Virtual Environments team within Cisco Technology Center, which is a group within Cisco chartered to look at new and emerging technologies as part of our Corporate Business Development organization. We are not a business unit shipping product, but rather a source of new technologies and ideas for Cisco. You'll probably notice quickly that we wander far from the beaten path regularly, as is our charter.
Having said that, we hope you enjoy the blog. Please don't be shy in commenting and asking questions, as that's part of this great conversation!
Cheers, the Cisco Technology Center team
Posted by Christian Renaud at 01:00 PM Permalink | Comments (8) | TrackBacks (4)
