The metaverse is the next big thing in the tech world. Like AI, the metaverse promises big-scale disruption. But how can enterprises leverage the coming disruption to their advantage?

The metaverse is a convergence of the physical and the virtual worlds. Users can recreate the physical experience in the digital sphere in an immersive mode.  The 360-degree experience on offer mimics the real-life experience.

Consider ecommerce. Simulated metaverse stores allow users to walk around the store. Shoppers can examine products and try out merchandise the same way they do at a physical store. They also get valuable information as annotations, something unavailable in a brick-and-mortar store.

Likewise, the metaverse allows remote teams to conduct meetings as in the physical world.

It is still early days for the metaverse, though. The full-blown adoption of the metaverse requires overcoming several roadblocks. Businesses need efficient leadership to overcome roadblocks and leverage the metaverse.

Creating Strategic Alignment

IT leaders have their work cut out to secure support and ensure the enterprise becomes receptive to the metaverse. They have to

• Convince the C-suite on the potential and benefits of metaverse. Without C-suite support, enterprise metaverse adoption remains a non-starter. The C-suite has to co-opt metaverse in the enterprise strategy and allocate budget.
• Work with other enterprise leaders and business managers to rework business models. Metaverse requires an overhaul of incumbent systems and business plans.
• Create action plans for metaverse adoption.

Building Metaverse Capabilities

The biggest challenge towards metaverse adoption is capability building. Metaverse requires capabilities outside the existing computing infrastructure.

IT leaders have to build, integrate, and manage capabilities to run metaverse-related assets.  

Ensuring Technology Availability

The basic role of IT leaders is to ensure tech availability to power metaverse.

The metaverse combines multiple technologies. It involves cirtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality, blockchain, and artificial intelligence. The immersive experience for users depends on hardware such as VR headsets and haptic feedback devices.

But with the metaverse still a work in progress, IT leaders always have to be on the lookout for developments in the space. They have to review if any new tech would fit into their business or disrupt the technology or systems in use.

Developing Legal Assets

Most enterprises underestimate the importance of legal compliance for metaverse success. Creating legal assets such as trademark and patent filings gives sound legal footing. Otherwise, there is a high risk of metaverse applications violating intellectual property laws.

Managing Data

Metaverse applications emit huge quantities of real-time data, much more than what even the most advanced AI applications use or generate. Metaversedata is also diverse, co-opting sensory, environmental, social, transactional, and user-behaviour data.

Analysing such data needs much higher computing power than what current AI systems analyse.

Platforms such as Confluent help enterprises overcome such infrastructural roadblocks. Confluence handles high-volume data ingestion in real time with low latency. Confluent’s Apache Kafka architecture can also scale horizontally to meet increasing loads. The in-built fault tolerance and data replication capabilities ensure resilience. All these enable smooth and responsive interactions.

Building Collaborative Systems

Metaverse success depends on the free flow of information unhampered by silos or blocks. Also, as with any other digital transformation project, seamless collaboration is a must for success.

The metaverse co-opts a wide network of platforms, content creators and infrastructure providers. It also uses social platforms in a big way.

Often, a small core team works on metaverse-related applications. But they have to need to connect with the tech team, marketing team, legal team, and others. As a nascent technology, collaboration with external developers and researchers is inevitable.

Metaverse leaders need to:

• Build collaboration systems that deliver seamless interoperability and collaboration among stakeholders.
• Ensure friction-free data and information flow throughout the enterprise.
• Develop network capabilities to select and collaborate with partners.

Data streaming platforms such as Confluent integrate data from diverse systems. These platforms deliver seamless data flows, and also enrich the data in real-time.

Preparing for Change

Metaverse involves large-scale digital transformation. And like any digital transformation project, it involves change and disruption of the status quo.

Organisational change aimed at building and integrating metaverse capabilities is challenging, though.

Leading from the Front

For a successful change, IT leadership has to lead from the front. They have to set examples and also attend to the finer details that may pose roadblocks or difficulties at the ground level. They have to promote metaverse proactively by

• Championing the vision and articulating the benefits.
• Empowering work teams to explore the potential of the metaverse.  

Creating an Innovation Ecosystem

Metaverse technology has a long way to go to replicate the richness of the real world. One big area that still requires considerable enhancements is creating lifelike avatars. As of now, metaverse avatars lack the details or the finer nuances to replicate their real-life counterparts. In such an environment, innovation becomes critical for success.

• Promote research and development to set the stage for innovation and experimentation.
• Create organisational systems that support risk-taking and experimentation.
• Support experimentation with metaverse-related technologies to explore various possibilities.
• Celebrate success.

Promoting a Culture that Supports Change

Successful metaverse adoption depends on a culture that supports and celebrates change. IT leadership has to prod the enterprise culture towards open sharing of information and a growth mindset. They have to motivate employees to strive for newer, better things.

Training and Equipping the Workforce

Enterprises having undergone digital transformation enjoy 3x revenue growth and cost savings compared to laggards. But only one in four organisations have the skills needed to exploit digital technologies. Lack of access to talent is the reason why about 70% of digital transformation initiatives fail.

The metaverse space is not different.

Success depends on the availability of talent that can get the best out of the ecosystem. But this is a tall order, considering the technology itself is still a work in progress.  Any metaverse-related skills will be in high demand and in short supply in the foreseeable future.

IT leaders have to train their workforce for competency in metaverse-related skills,

Arranging and coordinating training sessions is the easy part. The challenge is to:

• Engage with the workforce and convince them of the need for skill upgrades and transformation.
• Track the development of the relevant technology and structure targeted training interventions.

Promoting a New Approach to Security

Cyber threats are at an all-time high, and attackers targeting the metaverse are a fait accompli. Deepfakes hold the portent for things to come.

But the traditional notions of security, no matter how effective, will not work with the metaverse.

IT leaders have to balance security with UX.  The success of the metaverse depends on a seamless UX. Complex passwords, authentication hoops or security pop-ups disrupt the UX. Such security related frictions may lead to users forsaking the experience altogether.

IT leaders need to:

• Implement context-aware security that adapts to the context of the user’s interaction. Browsing a virtual store needs less stringent authentication than accessing a banking service.
• Co-opt gamified security to make security engaging and non-intrusive.

Identify Viable Use Cases

Despite the cutting-edge technology on offer, technology, for technology’s sake, never ends well. New tech adoption benefits only when it aligns with the business strategy.

IT leaders have to identify practical use cases for metaverse that will deliver business success. They have to identify market opportunities and analyse how they are relevant to the business. They also have to make a cost-benefit analysis of the viable use cases and metaverse projects that deliver maximum impact.

Not all projects will deliver a straightforward, direct ROI, though. The trick is to identify the indirect impact of the metaverse and tie such an impact to the bottom line. For instance, a metaverse space for immersive remote collaboration may be a game changer. But it need not make financial sense. The expenses for flight and hotel would be more cost-effective. But metaverse meetings have a big productivity impact. It would deliver manifold returns, though such returns may not be quantifiable.

Metaverse holds promise as the next version of the Internet. There are already several examples of businesses leveraging metaverse to roll-put hit products or services. Businesses that take a proactive approach gain a valuable first-mover advantage.