Enterprise Initiatives

I have been thinking about writing this post since I wrote this article about Second Life. As I was getting my daily updates from my Google Reader I came across Nick Malik's article called

Using Massive Multiplayer Online Concepts to Build a Shared Architecture

In this post Nick writes:

What I haven't seen yet (and perhaps it is the nature of the child-like games my kids play) is a MMO game where every person plays a role to build something instead of defeating something. It is easy to tear something down. Divide and Conquer. Building something up is much harder.

Welcome to Second Life. If you still are not up to speed on how Second Life is being used in the business world you must read this article called Alternate Universe. As I continue to follow the success of Second Life I often wonder why is it that Linden Labs can create such a successful architecture that runs a virtual world with over 8MM users world wide while most companies struggle to create an architecture to support the real world?

So I did a little homework and as I suspected, Linden Labs leverages open source technologies like MySQL, Apache, Squid, Mono, uBrowser (for online help) and Debian as its choice of operating systems to run its grid technology. Linden Labs provides developers with APIs that are simple REST style web services. They have their own proprietary XML format (called LLSD) that supports Perl, PHP, Python, and Ruby. They have a very robust portal and wiki which uses Mediwiki, another open source product.

The beauty of this architecture though is not the open source technologies that they have chosen but instead is the use of open standards which allows them to create a platform for others to build from. People can contribute to this platform as C++ developers, they can use Second Life's scripting language, they can leverage a host of third party tools and services, or they can simply use the tools provided by the user interface. This is a very open environment, much like many of the successful open source projects that exist today.

Now back to the topic of architecting the real world. As architects within an enterprise, we should take the time to review the benefits of the Second Life architecture and apply it to our work. Here are some of the obvious benefits:

1. Open; supports multiple development platforms
2. Easy to use; simple interface & documentation is easy to find on the wiki
3. Scalable; scale up by adding more nodes to the grid
   
4. Cost effective; use of open source reduces high cost of software licensing
5. Enables users; users are free to innovate and are not restricted by the architecture
6. Extendable; other companies can leverage platform to drive more revenue inward

Isn't this what we should be delivering in the real world? Do you think they spend a lot of time arguing over process? Do you think they spend a lot of time gathering user requirements? Or do they have a vision and know how to anticipate user needs? Have they tried to handle every possible exception in the world or did they create a robust set of standards that do not restrict usability and functionality?

There are still many people who are unaware of what is happening in the virtual world and others who are not taking this movement seriously. We just may be looking at the future of business where individuals and businesses do most of their commerce in virtual worlds. The architecture will definitely support it. Whether virtual worlds are the future or not, we should at least study the underlying architecture and the interactions that take place in their open development community.

I came across this article in the WSJ where companies are testing job interviewing in the virtual world called Second Life. Huh? I thought this was another gaming environment where people could spend countless hours wasting their life away. So I Googled Second Life and looked for more business uses of this virtual world. There where way too many articles about virtual sex but I did find a few articles like this one about virtual classrooms in SL and this one where Dell set up Dell Island. As my research continued I stumbled across one grassroots initiative who started leveraging SL for streaming video of keynotes and allowed you to attend breakout sessions. Another article from Brandweek discusses marketers challenges as they try to use SL to promote brand awareness.

Perform this search and you can see countless businesses dabbling in SL ranging from recruiting, advertising, educating, collaborating, to countless other innovative ideas. Then I found this article that shows how the Weather Channel, IBM, and Cisco are leveraging SL to advertise and create brand awareness.

All of this is mind boggling to me. I can understand people using SL as a gaming environment. But for someone like myself who has a full time job, a family, and a life, how can you justify spending countless hours "conducting business" in a virtual world? As the head of the architecture team at my work, it is my job to learn about all emerging technologies. I am constantly studying topics like Web 2.0, Open Source, SOA, virtualization and best practices such as change management, project and portfolio management, and IT governance. I feel obligated to take a deeper dive into SL but after walking around SL aimlessly for 30 minutes I decided to let others do the research for now and I'll stick to reading articles on this topic for the near future. Besides, it is hard enough to get new initiatives going in the real world. I can't even imagine selling management on the virtual world!

I would love to hear from anyone who has some real experience using SL for business reasons.