Have Your Avatar Call My Avatar: Virtual Business

IT's Role in a Virtual World

The IT department's role vis-à-vis its company's virtual-world activities will vary based on what the business wants to accomplish. If executives want a presence in an existing virtual world for marketing reasons, IT's role might be limited. But if they want a virtual world built behind the corporate firewall for meetings, IT will have a whole different set of responsibilities.

Here are some issues that you may have to address:

-- Access. Some IT departments have blocked access to virtual-world sites, so they will have to open ports if they want to encourage workers to experiment.

-- Public or private? Companies that want to try this technology for internal uses might decide it's better to build a platform that's behind the corporate firewall, while others might decide there's a business value in creating a presence in one or more public sites.

-- Hardware requirements. Some virtual-world sites have robust hardware requirements, and many companies' desktops and laptops lack the horsepower required to support them.

-- Security risks. IT needs to determine whether -- and, if so, what -- additional technologies need to be deployed to mitigate the risks associated with opening ports to the virtual world.

-- User education. Conversations in Second Life and other public virtual worlds aren't necessarily private, so users should be warned about disclosing proprietary information.

-- Build or buy? If the decision is to buy, IT has to consider how to evaluate a provider; if it's to build, IT has to determine which skills and equipment are needed.

-- Updates. Some virtual-world sites need to be updated every week or even every few days. That means IT will be very busy handling those updates, or it will need to allow tech-savvy users to handle them on their own.