In advance of its report on "How to Justify Enterprise Investment in Virtual Worlds," information and technology research and advisory firm Gartner has outlined a three-step, incremental approach that it believes will constrain costs and emphasize benefits for virtual worlds, helping companies gain needed funding and approvals.

According to the firm, business leaders are hesitant to invest in virtual worlds due to lack of clarity on their proven benefits. Said Gartner fellow and vice president Steve Prentice: “Despite understandable concerns about investment during a time of growing business uncertainty, we believe that the internal deployment of virtual worlds offers most enterprises significant benefits in cost savings and improved productivity.”

Gartner encourages companies to first emphasize their virtual worlds as training environments. Environments and scenarios can be replicated online for trainees to interact with each other and their trainers through avatars. "The benefits of improved employee knowledge and training can be clearly enumerated, and the savings (or transference of funding) compared with established training methodologies can be reliably calculated to build a credible and substantiated business case."

The firm then advises that companies extend their virtual-world deployment to support collaboration and employee interaction, enabling clients to cut down on travel and associated costs when gathering employees to a single site. Said Gartner, "The ability to show cost savings — for example, reduced use of expensive videoconferencing or telepresence facilities, as well as reduced international travel and "downtime" — to support and offset the initial investment forms the basis for a credible and defensible business case."

For the final stage, Gartner suggests adding a virtual world recreation of the social environment in workplaces, including seating areas, white boards, and even a water cooler. The contributions of these arrangements can be measured in their benefits to employee satisfaction, morale, retention, and innovation.

Prentice concluded: “The bottom line is to take a cautious and staged approach toward introducing virtual-world projects into the enterprise; moving too far and too fast will significantly reduce the chances of success, increase costs and make the benefits more difficult to quantify and attribute. By following the three-step sequence, virtual-world investments will have a greater chance of success and will lead the way toward future funding and deployment."