hyalineskies

Every corporate entity, be it a small, two-man consulting team or a multinational enterprise, thrives on collaborative communication. Billions of dollars are spent annually on all sorts of collaborative technology to maximise corporate efficiency, and such solutions transcend operating systems, hardware, and even more decidedly human factors such as location and language. A recent commercial for Microsoft’s collaborative technologies certainly reinforce the way that we do business in the information age: a fresh company recruit sites down at his new desk, only to be instant-messaged by a co-worker. When the recruit asks where the sender sits within the expansive office, the sender replies with “Prague.” This global office setting is tied together — and thus remains efficient — only because of the communications infrastructures that such corporations use to maintain outposts from afar and bridge geographical gaps with IT.

It is certainly not a revolutionary idea to state that business has changed with the Internet. At first, computers were used to automate or facilitate large arithmetic or data-based tasks in mainframe environments. With the desktop computer, small businesses saw the relatively inexpensive technology transform the way they, too, operated on a daily basis: more of their paper-based tasks shifted to a cleaner digital world. Soon thereafter, a large, internetwork structure exploded as access was expanded and access fees lessened. Now we see that Internet in use as the core of remote business systems, from AIM to Basecamp, iCal to Exchange. Thousands of company leveraged Research In Motion’s BlackBerry technology to take the core of office communication on the road, and many of the smarter corporate teams have seen the power of next-generation social tools such as MediaWiki to prove invaluable in adding collaborative ways to create, maintain and share corporate data.

True to the staid, impersonal business models created in the post-industrial world, these investments in information technology have done plenty to build systems around the core of corporate production: data. It has been data that is at the source of every economic model and every corporate bank account. It is only the data that executives and shareholders alike care about, and such data is what, in turn, motivates a company’s progress. In some ways, I can’t argue against this data model: after all, costs and benefits, profits and losses are at the heart of many economic modelling and theory applications in today’s business world.

This obsessive, one-track-mind way of thinking, though, is precisely why I never considered studying Business Administration, and the administrators of the world are very much blind to the other side of business by design. While powerful, time-tested-and-evolved models can be built from data, at the core of every economic system there is something more than money or machine: there is the human being. Since humans, however, are simply regarded as capital in the minds of a BA, equivalent to a computer or robot, very few business systems place any importance on the human factors of the enterprise, the emotions, preferences and individuality that shape our reasons for how, where and why we work. The social aspect of our lives is omitted by data that cares about little more than production.

Regardless of how much the brains-for-hire image has been drilled into the mind of helpless corporate executives, the human component has always found ways to subversively sneak into the production system across all corporate strata: while those with the menial desk jobs spend time around the water cooler, the executives sign deals and spend paid time on the links. Those in more labour-oriented positions, such as construction and heavy industry, have found a social outlet both thanks to and through unions. These social outlets are more than just a preferable way to waste time and drive down gross productivity rates; they are a necessity of human operation. We are social beings by nature.

In some ways, the dotcom extravagance was more than just needless flourish: it was a shift to a more human, more organic business model in which the individual was at least afforded a superficial recognition of the individual. Be it Nerf guns or Aeron chairs, workout facilities or weekly parties, the dotcoms put the emotion back into business. They tied our psyche to the workplace. Unfortunately, this playful model largely failed because those enacting it were as clueless to the economic end as the average post-industrial corporation is to the human end, not because the human methods were somehow fundamentally flawed.

For counterexamples to the dotcom failure, look at companies which did embrace the human as individual and their successes: Google is a prime example. Google’s Mountain View, Calif. headquarters, internally referenced as the Googleplex, is full of silly toys and odd architecture. Their employees have entirely flexible schedules and get to divide paid time between corporate and personal projects. Google has appealed to the human while still maintaining traditional business sense, and in doing so has built a company that is loved by employees and shareholders alike. Meanwhile, Google’s social media acquisitions, such as Writely and YouTube, as well as internally-produced systems like the Orkut social network, are utilised internally as well. Such collaborate tools are doing things in ways that stale old corporate software isn’t, and productivity is rebuilt into a human — albeit minimally so — way. The needs of human connection are catered to, and the increase in communication between workers allows more work to be done while maintaining social comfort. A Google engineer in Mountain View can gain a much greater personal grasp of a colleague in India by viewing a social network profile than by a company alias.

I sat in on a conference given by CNet Networks after being invited there by one of their journalists. There I met, in some form or another, the almost-legendary Joichi “Joi” Ito, Technorati International chair and venture capitalist. Ito and his colleagues have been using Blizzard’s World of Warcraft as a communication system as well as for entertainment purposes. “I think it was Cory [Ondrejka, VP of Product Development for Linden Lab] who first called [World of Warcraft] ‘the new golf,’” Ito said. “WoW… is a massive presence-sharing, group activity management system that people play all day.”

In a conventional business model, such a concept sounds more than impractical; it’s outrageous. However, World of Warcraft places a heavier human segment on collaborative technology: each individual, as in a real-world scenario, is represented by a digital manifestation of that person, be it idealised or outrageous, and such a physical appearance allows one to tie more personal metadata to a co-worker’s perceived persona. It ties an alias to a real-world colleague and offers a closer, more human atmosphere for communication than is awarded by other social media systems. Virtual worlds such as WoW bring together people that may materially exist on entirely separate continents into a smaller, more cognitively perceivable sphere.

I’ve never seen Joi Ito in person. I’ve never been to CNet’s headquarters in California or to California at all, for that matter. I have never had the opportunity to shake the hand of the journalist who invited me to the conference. In fact, Joi Ito never audibly said anything. The setting, the people, and the information exchanged all occurred between avatars, virtual representations of ourselves, in Linden Lab’s Second Life, where CNet has constructed its own virtual headquarters.

With collaborative tools like Second Life — yes, I just labelled a MMORPG as a collaborative tool — the transaction costs of transcontinental communication are decreased at the expense of true human contact, just like through all telecommuting. However, while other Internet-based tools accomplish the same goal, Second Life gives a novel and slightly more personal edge to such information sharing. It’s better than plain, text-based chat and certainly more fun.

The uncanny valley of avatar representation aside, Second Life and other tools obviously do play with most of what cognitive functions make us human; a recent report in The New York Times states that Second Life avatars “adhered to some unspoken behavioural rules of humans even though they were but pixels on a screen.” This Stephensonian world — a Metaverse, if you will — is exactly what Linden Lab is looking for, too: even Linden Lab refers to second life not as a game, but as a virtual world.

With Linden Lab’s development tools, there is little that keeps business entities from creating meaningful productivity objects within Second Life’s virtual atmosphere. In the current iteration of the software, such tools would be both rudimentary and painfully slow; my Mac Mini’s 1.5GHz G4 processor barely supports the base application. As Linden Lab’s own code becomes more efficient and our own hardware becomes more powerful, increasingly efficient, collaborative-workplace objects are not unrealistic. Meanwhile, such complex resources place an even greater human context into a mechanical process, further closing the communicative gaps that exist in long-distance work. At this point, the use of Second Life in the workplace is little more than a novelty to all but the most hardcore techies, but the concept is certainly worth noting as a way that we could realistically see business conducted in the future. We have constantly witnessed a higher abstraction of the mechanical into human form, from the command-line to the GUI. We can, too, witness this abstraction in the software we use, from our very first versions of Corel’s WordPerfect or Lotus Notes to Writely and Google Calendar. This abstraction could move further into the social, where we conduct actual business within a human metaverse, a place we currently find as a realm for little more than procrastination and petty amusement. Many of us in technology always talk about our “virtual lives:” ironically, that may become even more fitting in the future.