Cisco Systems Podcast Trancript for: Collaborating in Virtual Worlds Air date: October 11th, 2007
Podcast url: http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/podcasts/ciscocast_nve_101107.html
Julie Harman: Hello, and welcome to this podcast series about trends, technology and business. For Cisco, I am Julie Harman. For the past eleven years, Christian Renaud has had a great job at Cisco – he’s in charge of dreams. He is the Chief Architect, Networked Virtual Environments, for the Cisco Technology Center. On October 11th, Christian’s sharing his vision when he gives the keynote address at the Virtual Worlds Conference. But before that appearance, he took a few minutes to tell me what he’s learned about the evolution of work. Christian, thank you so much for being with us today. Christian Renaud: Well, thank you, it’s good to be here. Julie Harman: Please describe for people who may not be familiar, what is the virtual world? Christian Renaud: This is where really there’s a lot of interest and a lot of creative energy. You have the gaming industry immersing virtual experiences that have been going on there intersecting at this particular point in time with enterprise collaboration; things like TelePresence, things like WebEx, and the intersection of those two is really where a lot of this creative energy is occurring. So, if you talk to the people who create these virtual world platforms, they originally envisioned these as socialization platforms. Various people get in and communicate with one another and then when businesses got in and started talking about doing distributed teams, collaborating in those, it sort of caught everybody off guard, but then everybody said “aha, obviously, this is the perfect tool for distributive work forces”. And so, I think what you’re seeing right now is cherry picking sort of the best features of the gaming community and bringing those into the mainstream. If you look at the majority of the workforce these days, it falls squarely in the category of the gamer generation. And so you have people that have been raised on this metaphor their entire life and now they go to work, they sit down, they look at a very flat two dimensional Excel spreadsheet. I need people to collaborate, I need them to collaborate over long distances – what tools are available for me to do that? Well, I can go in a World of Warcraft raid with a bunch of my friends that might be all over the world. Why can’t I do my engineering project that way? Julie Harman: So, this is really the vocabulary that this generation grew up with and this is what they’re comfortable with?
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Christian Renaud: Yes, that’s a very good way of saying it. If you look at the common enterprise, the work force is scattered all over the world. My own team is in nine different time zones so we don’t get an opportunity to get together over a desk very frequently. One of the things that you take for granted if you’re in a physical office with cubicles surrounded by your co-workers is you bump into each other at the water cooler or at the gym and you have all these informal offline interactions and that’s where a lot of productivity comes from. Well, you don’t get that if you’re in nine different times zones. That serendipity can’t happen. But if you create a common shared space like a virtual world, like a virtual office, then I can bump into colleagues of mine from our Swiss office and our French office and have that water cooler conversation. And if you look at how we are biologically hard-wired as humans, we’ve got millions of years of experience in dealing with 3D objects, especially human-looking objects in a 3D space and only within, what, the last fifty thousand years have we trained ourselves how to use symbols like text. Julie Harman: How does this electronic communication compare to teleconferencing, TelePresence, telephony? Where does it fall on the scale of better than or worse than? Christian Renaud: I think TelePresence is the best as far as on that continuum because I’m approximating that over-the-desk interaction. The only thing I can’t do is shake your hand, right? Or smell you, for example. And probably something like instant messaging would be the worst because all I have is text and I can’t read your emotion and your nonverbal behavior. So when you find yourself talking with an avatar and the avatar nods or they lean back or they lean forward and they smile, you find yourself actually – and there’s great studies being done at Stanford about this – you biologically react. Julie Harman: Why was now the right time for Cisco to be involved in something like this? Christian Renaud: If you look at what this technology is, it’s making place not matter and it’s a way that people can collaborate very richly over IP and these are two core businesses of Cisco’s. If you look at IP telephony, if you look at TelePresence, if you look at WebEx, these are in that same collaboration toolbox; and right now the entire virtual industry is in a very rich time creatively, so this is a very good time for us to be in because the market’s still very early and there’s still a lot of great stuff that we can make happen. Julie Harman: You talk about the three attributes of the future of work – can you describe what these are and how are they going to change everything in the future?
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Christian Renaud: The workforce is becoming very, very distributed and that affects work as we know it and how you go from having very centralized, condensed, consolidated work teams in cubicles in the same geographic location to having a virtual workforce scattered all over the world. The second piece is when you begin to introduce contractors and outsourcing, you get into more of a Hollywood style of work, which is a bunch of creative people getting together to accomplish a particular work task and then when that task is over dispersing and going on to the next thing. And the third piece of that, the bedrock that allows both of these first two to occur are rich collaboration tools that allow these people to interact as if they were all penned up in the same conference room on a regular basis and therefore have the benefit of that signal-rich interaction over the desk. Julie Harman: What are the benefits of a virtual workforce in terms of cost efficiency, environmental sustainability and all those issues? Christian renaud: Well, obviously, I don’t have to travel as much. (Laughs) That’s always a good start. Now if I have a work team that’s collaborating in a conference room in a virtual environment, I can actually augment that conference room with all sorts of information, documents and blogs and wikis and things in a way that I can’t physically do in the real world. I can’t make documents float above the conference table in the real world but I can do that virtually. So, I can actually begin to make it better than an over-the-desk interaction. Julie Harman: When you present these ideas to seasoned senior management who have grown up in the old-school style of hierarchical organizations, do they get it? Christian Renaud: I’ve been doing incubation innovation at Cisco for eleven years so I’m used to having people look at me kind of funny (laughs) and say are you kidding? In this particular case, I’m getting calls from the people that usually look funny at me because they’ve been conditioned over the last few years about outsourcing and about the Hollywood style of work and they see the opportunity for this technology to fill a hole where there currently is no tool for a common shared workspace. And so if I take this to – if you would – seasoned technology laggards, I’m actually finding them a lot more responsive these days than, you know, in days past when I brought them other new ideas. Julie Harman: In the virtual world where do you think we are in terms of adoption rates and how do you see this changing over the next few years?
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Christian Renaud: If you look at the big numbers that are communicated by the Virtual Worlds platform vendors, they add up to greater than the population of North America. If you look at the number of actual concurrent users, that number is considerably smaller: it’s twenty to twenty five percent of the size. But that’s still actually a really large number. That’s a hundred million people. Having said that, compared to the 1.7 billion people that use the internet, it’s actually a small number. So I think we’re still in the early stages of the maturity of this and the next couple years are really the crucible for the industry. Julie Harman: What does the virtual world industry need to do to mature this product, to see this move forward and not just be a novelty? Christian Renaud: This is an excellent question. There are some things that the industry needs to do to get through its adolescence. And some of that is we need to get to some common semantics and some common counting. So actually one of the things that we’re announcing is the Metavest Market Index and what we’re going to create is a common index, but we’re not tracking stock prices. We’re tracking virtual worlds and subscribers and economies and things like that. We are going to be engaging with a number of other organizations into a virtual world’s interoperability forum and really bringing a lot of parties together to discuss what we can do to make all of these platforms interoperable with one another. We need to have some interoperability to take the risk out of it, to get the mainstream adoption, to get into the hundreds of millions – if not billions – of active users like you have with the web today. Julie Harman: What do you tell people when you’re sitting next to them on a plane and they go, so what do you do? Christian Renaud: I have one of the funnest jobs that, of anybody that I know. But the answer that I give people, to be quite honest with you, is we’re taking the current style of work or the current tools that exist for people to get work done and really updating those. Julie Harman: Christian Renaud, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us today. This was a really, really fascinating conversation. Christain Renaud: Yeah, it’s a lot of fun. Thanks for having me today. Julie Harman: And thanks to you, the audience, for being part of the conversation. To listen to other podcasts in this series, please visit newsroom.cisco.com. Until next time, I’m Julie Harman for Cisco.
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