By Natasha Lomas, 31 January 2008 11:48
NEWS
Nortel Networks is looking to the next generation of employees to shape the workplace of tomorrow - and high on its agenda is exploring the role of web 2.0 technologies and virtual worlds such as Linden Lab's Second Life.
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Nortel enterprise CTO Phil Edholm told silicon.com: "A lot of businesses have set up a virtual presence [in Second Life] and what they find is what's the point?
"But if in fact I could walk up to the virtual support desk and meet the avatar of the virtual support person which would then find somebody in the company that has the right skills to actually help me that could become of great value."
Edholm said Nortel has been doing some "demos and trials" with Second Life and contact centre applications. It has also been working with universities and students to learn how they use comms technology - with the aim of understanding how to translate the likes of thriving online social networks such as Facebook into a business environment.
All this is with a view to then building these next-generation functions into its products.
He said: "If you get these students coming out of university and they're used to doing their homework with their friends on IM, they're used to Facebook, they're used to virtual worlds - how do you recreate that environment in the work world?"
Edholm reckons it won't so much be a workplace of the future - rather the potential of "true mobile broadband" offered by future fourth-generation networks will mean work is something that is done, not necessarily a place you go to.
Eventually, he predicts, bandwidth across different types of networks will converge so the type of network being used does not impact on the experience of the user - be it wi-fi, cellular or wired. This prediction has been dubbed 'Edholm's Law'.
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Comments
There are 5 comments. Join the discussion
1. Martin Lukes
Yeah, right. If you're talking about basic level jobs, sure. But how are you going to get promotion in British companies if you don't suck up to your boss, get in earlier and go home later?
Lukes's Law says: Promotion is in negative proportion to technical competence and in direct proportion to sycophancy.
Try that with your boss from home and see how far you get.
2. anonymous
Duhhh! Given decent bandwidth (which he predicts!) why am I going to "walk" up to a virtual person and deal with them when I could just use desktop to desktop video using my webcam or even mobile phone camera and talk to a real person???
Oh yes, because the "virtual person" will really be an AI program that will understand and answer my questions, finally routing me to a real person when it fails to satisfy me! In your dreams! If I'm dealing with some AI based FAQ - why does it need to have the added complexity of pretending to be a person?
What is this person smoking??
3. Roger Huffadine
This looks like a big a pile of bullshit as the paperless office of the 1970s.
Economics will dictate that most of this never happens.
Mobiles capable of making video calls have been around for 5 years so where are the video call centres? Uh, nowhere - not because of the lack of technology but because of economics, infrastructure weakness and social preferences.
Now although we have mobiles capable of speech & video people often prefer to use text and shorthand to communicate.
I really can't see all this 2nd World being 2 mch of a suxess
4. anonymous
This make work in northwestern europe or USA, where personal interaction is less important than in other cultures.
5. anonymous
"This make work in northwestern europe or USA, where personal interaction is less important than in other cultures."
I think not! I deal a lot with a very technologically competent company that already uses remote working, online collaboration etc. - or at least tries to - in precisely those geographies. The one consistent comment people make is that they lack face to face interaction.
It is going to take a LONG time for this type of thing to become common and accepted - if ever! Bear in mind that "virtual worlds" have actually been around at least since 1996 when I remember demonstrating them at public events. That's 12 years so far and, for all the hype, they are hardly mainstream. "number of members" is a world of difference from "number of unique, regular users"!
Totally agree with the analogy to the "paperless office". I was around when that "arrived" and one of the sceptics who doubted it would truly occur. Instead we generate more stuff faster and turn lots of it into paper. Whatever, it has probably had a negative effect on the quality of communication!