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For many employers, social networking websites like Facebook are a menace - an all-too tempting distraction for staff who can easily waste hours of work time keeping up with friends online.
With the cumulative cost of an employee who spends, say, an hour a day surfing unproductively potentially adding up to thousands of dollars a year, it is no surprise many businesses are blacklisting sites like Facebook. But others argue there are business advantages to be had out of social networking, and even from the increasingly popular pastime of living out a virtual existence in online realms such as Second Life.
UK-based Cliff Dennett says the type of interactions happening online in places like Second Life and World of Warcraft mirror the type of activities that could help businesses thrive.
"In corporate speak it's millions of people collaborating in virtual project teams around the world with people they've never met solving complex strategic and tactical problems using an IT system," he says.
Dennett, who has been in New Zealand speaking at IBM forums on "the new working frontier", says the online gaming model demonstrates "underlying principles of usability" that businesses could put to work.
He also points to research which shows significant numbers of online gamers report that they have improved their leadership skills as a result of the activity.
Meanwhile, Dennett sees it as counter-productive to ban work-time access to networks like Facebook because today's new jobseekers who have grown up with the internet will shun employers who take that approach.
"My kids will come into an organisation and if there's nothing Facebook-like, nothing World of Warcraft-like, if there's nothing to interest them in terms of technology, they'll walk and go somewhere where there is," he says.
IBM is one of a number of major IT companies putting time and money into the Second Life environment. Ross Pearce, Auckland-based managing consultant for IBM Global Business Services, says a recent survey of more than 200 IBM staffers who are online gamers echoed the earlier findings about its effects on leadership skill development. He says the survey found people who were good leaders in an online gaming environment were able to set context and communicate a vision, some goals and targets.
"They were good at collaborating, helping to resolve problems and issues and they were good at giving people feedback as to how they were doing," he said. Second Life's popularity has soared in the past year with the number of users registered to roam the virtual world leaping from one million to more than eight million.
IT research firm Gartner predicts that by 2011 80 per cent of active internet users and the same proportion of Fortune 500 companies in the US will have some type of interaction with Second Life or another virtual world.
IBM announced last week it would have (real life) sales representatives staffing its virtual business centre in Second Life 24 hours a day, five days a week.
Companies like IBM are collectively investing millions of dollars to build an effective Second Life presence for fear that if they don't they will get left behind.
Second Life, which has its own currency that is exchangeable for real world money, is becoming a thriving economy. Virtual property speculation and other trading within Second Life continues to grow, amongst claims some professional participants now make more money through the virtual world than they previously did in their real-world jobs.
Dennett says his message is not that the business world needs to go entirely virtual, but rather that there is potential to enhance business by adding a virtual element to the mix.
"Here [within virtual games] is where the sorts of things that we want from an IT system are being achieved already in terms of leadership, retaining people and engaging them in complex issues and problems," he says.
"Here's where that's working and it's working to a massive economic commercial extent. Now, what can we learn from that and apply in our own environment?"
