The IBM Advantage
Posted on December 14, 2006
Filed Under Insights |
To date IBMs’ Second Life islands have been closed except to the IBM insiders and alumni. What IBM does for business in Second Life therefore is part of tomorrow’s news. But to preview: there is already a buzz around retail. Far more interesting from a wider cultural perspective IBM is demonstrably discovering that the virtual world liberates the inner passions of its staff. I say this cautiously but it may well be that a hidden role for Second Life is actually an HR one. Why?
Strolling through some inner sanctum that I’m not yet allowed to talk about I came across a group of IBMers and told them my interests. I write principally about culture. I believe culture is changing in fundamental ways whether it is in our relationships to non-western cultures, the growing role of religious belief in all our cultures, the effect of replacing human memory with machine memory, the increasing power to communicate and to engage in design and development of the products and services around us, or our anxiety about the ecology of nature.
These are all powerful movements in the human and as yet they don’t seem to play through in the cultural forms we use to express our reactions to change, or the lack of it. I’m thinking TV, radio, painting, movies. So an avatar by the name of Anita told me: here we are building primitive forms of art.
What?
But it so happens she is right. In the very strictest sense of the word art there is an art-work by an IBM Argentinian staffer hanging in a virtual wall - just as it hangs on a real wall within an IBM building. It’s truly a beautiful piece of work and I can see how it might be borne out of a life that criss-crosses the virtual and real. That’s interesting but not so special that it speaks to the fundamental changes I’m thinking of.
But art is also about a point of view, however obliquely expressed and for my money our understanding of change is too underdeveloped for powerful viewpoints yet to emerge. What is taking place on the intellectual side of the IBM islands though is a novel kind of engagement for the workplace.
Roo Reynolds the IBM metaverse evangelist told me that the surprise of Second Life is the rapid discovery that work is not engaging the professional passions of IBMers until you put them in an intellectual environment where much remains to be built -where in fact all is frontier. That brings out the philosopher, artist, painter, thinker, and of course do-er. For all that Second Life might do for IBM’s business, its interest right now is the extent to which it allows people to slip the corporate knot and pursue their interests. That’s why I say it could be an HR coup for big blue.
Anita’s message is, I think, that by building a virtual world we can maybe think more clearly about the faults and disruptions in the real one, and we can factor in and develop those abstract concepts that convey meaning beyond words and images. A sad fact of the computer age is we’ve become too literal. The virtual might be the kind of liberator that delivers a Picasso instead of more Hirsts and Emins.
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Great post Hadyn (and not just because I’m a fan of SL). I thought Wladawsky-Berger, vice president of technical strategy and innovation at IBM, really said it perfectly (as quoted on CNet News) - “Virtual reality connects directly with the human mind. There is something very human about visual interfaces. I almost think of text-based interfaces, including browsers, as ‘narrowband’ into our brains, whereas visual interfaces are ‘broadband’ into our brains.”