December 26, 2007

Happy Virtual 2008

"As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Happy New Year! 2008 is going to be jam packed with virtual activities for Cisco. With so many exciting virtual events coming I can't even name them all but here are few upcoming dates. Make sure you mark your calendar.

CES Round Table, January 8th at 1pm PDT
Come talk about CES and celebrate the Cisco Second Life virtual campus one year anniversary.

Data Center Mixed Reality BannerCasts, January 23rd and January 31st at 8:30am PDT
Two exciting mixed reality events featuring Jayshree Ullal, SVP, Data Center, via live video.

Second Life TechChat: Transforming Business Models with Cisco TelePresence, February 7th at 12:00pm PDT
During this TechChat Randy Harrell, Director of Product Marketing, will discuss Cisco TelePresence, concentrating on business case studies and the enabling technology.

As stated in numerous posts Cisco is participating in virtual environments because we want to engage with you in enabling the future. That being said, 2007 is all most over...it turned out to be a productive and exciting year for those of us pioneering in the virtual age ;-)

I for one learned a lot in 2007 from my colleagues, our customers and fellow virtual frontier folk. Here are my top three virtual learning's:

Don't duplicate real life
Leverage virtual environments to do something you can't do in real life. Our Connected Life Contest event was a great example of using a virtual world to enable a conceptual demonstration for event attendees to interact with.
I know it has been said 100 times before but it is true and something I still have to review every time I talk to someone about virtual worlds.

Don't believe the hype
There has been a flurry of folks buzzing about how virtual worlds are either the bane of existence or the savior of mankind over the course of 2007. I know that for every one person who attends one of our virtual events looking to refute the ROI there is another looking to evangelize the value add.
You say tomato, I say tomato but how about we don't call the whole thing off?

Patience is a virtue
It seems like every time I run an event there is always at least one person:
--with some kind of technical difficulty to hammer through...sometimes it is me.
--who wants to derail the discussion with their own agenda.
--that misses the content all together because they were so caught up in the user interface.
In the long run a system is only as good as its operator.

This is the time of year that one makes resolutions. I have one that I feel confident I can achieve which is to keep learning, every day, and enjoy every minute of it. I all ready mentioned some of our 2008 activities but that is truly just the tip of the iceberg. So check back often and be part of creating the future with Cisco.

"The best way to predict the future is to create it." – Peter Drucker

Posted by Dannette Veale at 11:15 AM Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

December 21, 2007

Virtual Workplace - a 2011-2012 Vision

For those of us that have been through the scars of previous technology and paradigm shifts, it's always interesting to watch a new cycle evolve. It usually starts with a great bit of fanfare, vision, bold predictions and concerns of "that's crazy...it'll never work...why would anyone care about that...??" etc, etc. And then after a little while (usually 12 months), the hype slows down and there are lulls while people get down to the business of creating the actual technology and associated companies. During these lulls, doubt often creeps in and we find out who has actual vision and who is riding the coattails of hype.

During the initial lull in any technology cycle, I like to ask the following questions to help me determine if the lull is temporary or potentially permanent.

1. Can I explain the benefit of the technology (or vision) in 1-2 sentences, or do I need to ramble through some story?

2. If I can explain it in 1-2 sentences, do semi-technical people understand it, or at least ask good questions to clarify?

3. If this technology was open-sourced, as opposed to being controlled by a single company (or a small number of companies), are there enough interesting aspects to get communities of developers to engage with it?

4. If it's not happening already, what is going to be the "ah ha" moment when people will actually start valuing it enough to pay for it, or at least associating valid business models with it?

5. If it went away tomorrow, would anyone really miss it within 3-6 months?

So how does all of this relate to the Virtual Workplace? In the simplest terms, the intersection of Virtual Worlds, Business Worlds and Globalized Worlds is creating an inflection point in the marketplace around how people communicate and collaborate. We know the pace at which the Business World is changing. We're understanding the impact that the Globalized World is having on our day-to-day lives, but what we don't exactly know is how the virtual aspect of Virtualized Worlds will truly impact the way we interact. This is where the answers to those previous 5 questions will shape markets.

I threw out the dates 2011-2012 in the title of the blog post, so let me throw out some predictions of what this Virtualized World might look like around that time frame. ([NOTE: These are personal predictions and should not be considered guidance or forecasting by Cisco).

1. Pundits and companies will no longer talk about Virtualized Environments in terms "alternative environments" or "you can do anything you want", but rather focus their message on the things that are unique to the medium, or an order of magnitude better than previous mediums. For example, I expect someone will come up a next-generation "meeting" environment that combines the trust of Cisco Telepresence, the simplicity of Cisco WebEx, the robust visualization of IBMs Many Eyes, the recommendation engine of Amazon, the social-grid of LInkedIn and the serendipity we see in aspects of Cisco's Second Life campus.

2. People will stop talking about Virtualized Environments in terms of "avatars", as the medium becomes much more of a blend between virtual-presence and humanized interaction. Maybe it'll be simple things like dynamic system movement based on your people or content interactions (so we can stop bumping into walls). Maybe it's a live webcam feed of your face as you speak to convey actual emotion or trust. But hopefully it evolves to a point where you don't think about it as a tool to interact with, but rather it seamlessly blends into our daily workflows that are already highly connected.

3. Users won't have to think about full-blown Virtual Environments like we do today with Second Life or Club Penguin, but rather they will think about grabbing the aspect that is interesting or valuable to them and add it to their world via widget-like applications. For example, the "fly-on-the-wall" widget will let a colleague capture a live virtual engagement and flip it to you as easy as sending an email and you'll be able to view it on your mobile phone without any new client software.

4. Like the telephone system, where interaction with anyone is necessary, Virtual Environments will become the "ah ha" driver to build blended "Inside-the-firewall" and "cloud-computing" environments. As we saw in the examples from Wikinomics, the ability to create environments that allow diverse groups of people to interact will be key for all companies, big and small. The technologies exist to create those environments, and the winning companies will be the ones that unlock the doors that are creating barriers between those paradigms today.

So with those predictions, I wish the blogosphere a happy and healthy Holiday Season, and all the best in 2008!!

Posted by Brian Gracely at 07:50 AM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

December 20, 2007

Value

"What has never been doubted, has never been proven."- Diderot

I think of this quotation often these days when reading the frequent broadsides against virtual worlds, the departures of major corporations from Second Life, and stories questioning the value derived by corporations such as Cisco and IBM in the virtual world.

Although I cannot speak for other companies, it is easy enough to quantify the value that Cisco derives from our interactions with our customers and partners on our Virtual Campus in Second Life. (If any of our customers or partners wish to comment about the value, or lack of, they receive, I'll be happy to contact them and create a follow-up post as a complement to this one.)

To further quote the late quality guru Dr. W. Edwards Deming, and probably the antithesis of Denis Diderot, "In God we trust....all others bring data." Here's the data:

1) Customer Contact

In the last year, we've had tens of thousands of customers visit our virtual campus to participate in roundtables, Tech Talks, training, executive briefings, focus groups, press conferences, product launches, and the list goes on. 'Frequent Customer Contact' is our corporate mantra at Cisco, and any mechanism that increases our ability to work closer and more frequently with our customers is extremely valuable.

2) Innovation Input

We've created prototypes of potential products and elicited input from the customer community in Second Life, which we have been directly able to incorporate into our advanced development efforts. Think of it like a focus group providing new product input, 24x7x365, worldwide. There is an artifact of one of these 'elicitation events' on the second floor of the Technology Center building on our virtual campus today, the Health Presence Pod, which is a proof of concept to stimulate discussion about what can be done to improve the current state of tele-medicine.

3) Shared spaces

As I said in a prior post, there is a value of a common virtual space for the community to meet and interact. If it is an internal team meeting that crosses geographies, a business meeting, or a workshop with 50 customers, having a virtual 'clubhouse' to socialize in is a powerful substitute for the 'beer and pizzas' user-group meetings of days past.

To Staff or not to Staff........

One question we frequently receive is why our virtual campus in Second Life is not staffed for walk-through traffic. Our answer is simple, we view our virtual campus as a place for our customers and partner community to socialize, with a healthy quantity of events held there to stimulate conversation and network-building (no pun intended). We are not a retail sales operation, selling routers and switches to customers who walk in, and we do not consider our virtual campus a retail outlet. The customers we meet for the first time in Second Life at our events generally ask to exchange additional information with us, email addresses or phone numbers, for follow on conversations and our help in locating local Cisco channel partners from which to purchase from. And when Linden Labs incorporates the ability to 'call out' via voice or instant messaging to customer service agents, we will provide those mechanisms for casual visitors.

Ultimately, any tool or technology that allows Cisco to have high-quality, direct, and global customer feedback on a regular basis has direct value to us, as it is the Customer who drives our company.

Posted by Christian Renaud at 06:48 AM Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

December 13, 2007

The value of ‘Place’

In 1999, James Scott penned a book entitled ‘Seeing Like a State’, where he illustrated excellent examples of how organizations and governments have designed buildings and cities without considering the local habits and styles of the population. In the book, the employees or citizens recognized that there were very few areas for them to socialize informally in these optimized workplaces or cities, which is how many cultures exchange important social ideas and other information.

The difficulty in civic planning is you don’t know where the citizenry wants to congregate, much as companies cannot anticipate where the social loci will be for it’s employees. If you add to this the growing trend towards organizational decentralization, it makes it critical for organizations to provide a substitute for the break-room or water cooler conversation, to allow that free-flow of ideas between employees. This also extends beyond employee/employer relationships to customers and partners.

When we utilize virtual workspaces, be it our Cisco Virtual Campus in Second Life, our Industry Solutions Partner Network, or other intraverses within the company, we are providing a Place for people to congregate, socialize, and brainstorm. This virtual workspace transcends traditional physical boundaries and allows for free-flow of information and ideas continuously worldwide. It becomes the corporate breakroom, the park in Brasilia, the clubhouse, the ‘beer and pizzas night’, where like-minded people can congregate.

This is evident in the design of our Cisco Virtual Campus in Second Life, which recently won the Society for New Communications Research 2007 Award of Excellence in the Online Communities/Virtual Worlds category. When we initially designed it, we thought it would be used for people to interact with content we had provided into the environment, but we quickly discovered that what people wanted a common place to socialize and network. We ultimately ended up ‘virtually bulldozing’ the virtual campus and rebuilding it around informal and formal meeting spaces.

As we begin our second year in public virtual worlds, we will continue to focus our efforts on building communities and dialog between our customers, partners and employees. We look forward to seeing you around campus!

Posted by Christian Renaud at 06:50 AM Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)