Virtual worlds can help businesses to go green
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An impressive collection of international thought leaders in the field of green technology and renewable energy gathered in Cork last week. Their destination, the annual IT@Cork Technology in Business conference, their focus… Green IT: how organisations can use technology intelligently to reduce their environmental impact and improve profits.
There were some excellent speakers at the event – truly world class – and collectively they delivered a sobering and compelling message of spiralling carbon emissions and the pressing imperative for all of us to take action now to reduce our energy consumption at home and at work.
Much of what was said at the conference focussed on using technology like smart meters, intelligent monitoring devices and clever software to reduce large organisation’s energy usage and flatten the electricity demand curve, making supply more efficient. But there were speakers who examined the ways technology can help us to work smarter, to do our jobs more efficiently and effectively.
There’s no doubt that technology is changing the workplace irrevocably. The way online tools facilitate the exchange of information and mass collaboration is having a profound effect on the way businesses operate around the world, and consequently on the way employees do their work — or perhaps it’s the other way around.
One of the most interesting presentations at the conference was by Pierre-Olivier Carles, co-founder of Stonfield InWorld, a French company that specialises in helping businesses to create virtual world solutions to their business problems.
“Virtual Worlds represent a tremendous opportunity to reduce companies’ carbon footprints,” explained Pierre-Olivier. “They will change the way we work, reducing dramatically the volume of business trips, which will not only have a huge positive impact on costs but also on a company’s carbon footprint.”
Virtual worlds are exactly that: three dimensional computer generated facsimiles of the real world. In them you can meet with other people, and interact in ways that are broadly parallel with the way you’d interact in real life. The most well known of these virtual world is the Linden Lab developed Second Life.
In his presentation Pierre-Olivier delivered some compelling examples of how implementing virtual worlds for online training, business meetings and even online retail can deliver significant real world benefits for businesses, reducing their costs, improving working conditions for employees and of course reducing their environmental impact.
For example, a pilot virtual classroom project for the Pyrénées Gascogne division of French bank Crédit Agricole realised a saving of €400,000 per annum in travel costs, improved training efficiency, and saved employees a lot of valuable time and additional stress. A residual benefit of the programme is that Crédit Agricole is effectively future-proofing it’s workforce – preparing them today to use the technology that will be commonplace tomorrow.
The day when virtual worlds are seen as ubiquitous mainstream business tools, when they become a routine component of everyday working life, is still some way off. But with pressure growing on businesses to reduce both their costs and their carbon footprint that day could well be closer than we think.
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Pierre’s presentation was very interesting. I recently had a tour of IBM’s Innovation Centre in Dublin and it’s incredible what happens when Virtual Worlds are presented using low-cost 3D viewing wall technology and the Virtual Meetings are backed up by powerful meeting-management software. They’re using this stuff running in their ‘cloud’ to run global brainstorming sessions, etc.
One of the problems with the green message came across in exchanges between Chris Tuppen (BT) and Gavin Starks (AMEE). Chris was talking about some changes BT was making to its product line to reduce energy consumption and Gavin likened this to feeling smug because you had reduced your crack cocaine habit and made some other comparison between BT and drug dealers that escaped me as there was an audible intake of breath from most of the audience at this, possibly unintentionally, rude and insensitive comment.
It reminded me of the moral philosophy paradox – everything is potentially immoral using the ‘by extension’ argument. For example, is standing on a wooden pier immoral? Well it is if there are so many people on the pier that your weight causes it to collapse…
Hi Calvin !
Thank you so much for your kind post. I’m very glad you liked my presentation. If you want, you can find the slides I showed on my English blog, here :
http://eng.pocarles.com/entry/8392/45556
I really had great time at Cork, with so many people involved and passionate !
Thanks for the comments Paraic and Pierre-Olivier.
I know what you mean about the green message Paraic… there is a tendency for people who are passionate to be unreasonably zealous: BT were taking the responsible step of making products people demand more energy efficient. I would have thought that should be encouraged, rather than denigrated.
I understand people who are passionate becoming overzealous, but the problem with that is you end up alienating the very people you need to reach.
C!