Lebogang Chaka, Principal Director for Talent and Organisation at Accenture in Africa, discusses what the burning calls to action about embracing the Metaverse are. The first call is to gain an understanding of what the Metaverse is. The second important point is to ask whether this applies to your business and how will you show value if you can use it in your industry.
Thirdly, what are you prepared to do with the Metaverse in your organisation? Finally, one needs to figure out if a Metaverse collaboration ecosystem will make sense and deliver value from this new way of working.
The Metaverse Continuum, as we term it in Accenture, is an evolution of the internet that enables us to move beyond ‘browsing’ to ‘participating or inhabiting’ in a persistent shared experience that spans the spectrum of our natural world to an entirely virtual world. The Metaverse provides new ways of working on a massive new canvas for content.
The Metaverse is a creative space for brands to create new types of deep employee or customer engagement through play. It brings people together around shared passions, ideals, and the desire to connect ‘in person’ even across the globe as part of a centralised community. One must not underestimate the role of the Metaverse as an engine for commerce as it unlocks new ways of creating value through ownership, business and governance.
The most significant business relevance is how the Metaverse enables enterprises to reimagine how they do business. It will change how companies compete for and engage talent, revolutionise supply chains in unimagined ways, allow firms to explore new areas of opportunity, and change how they position themselves to meet their customers where they want to be.
What do these new experiences in this new future bring?
The Metaverse holds many changes for the running of a business. These changes will significantly impact the employees, management and firms’ operations. Employees will gain new ways to learn, connect and collaborate where hybrid workers experience similar realities regardless of where and how they work. Embracing the Metaverse management can interact with an immersive view of operational systems and networks across the ecosystem to enable data-driven decision-making. The future of operations holds the promise of integrated processes within an enterprise and across supply networks, allowing streamlined execution.
However, what is this place where we will meet in the Metaverse?
– A place to learn: empowering employees to manage their learning journey fosters the ability to practice and problem solve in real-time, increasing learning effectiveness and retention.
– A place to collaborate: allows multiple offices/locations to collaborate creatively, moving from video conferencing and ‘zoom fatigue’ to experience.
– A place to work: the Metaverse enables organisations to recruit and onboard employees by bringing the workplace to the employee by providing opportunities to collaborate and engage with the flexibility of where they work.
– A place to manage: in the new ways of working, managing the business virtually will be feasible through increased connectivity of teams, dynamic collaboration, and erasing unconscious bias for employees with a focus on retaining employees.
– A place to operate: digital twins of the natural world inform how new equipment and behaviours will impact work-moving beyond pure simulation to trigger actual business processes, reduce development times, and increase operational efficiencies.
Technologies are the underpinning which powers the employee experience, the product, services and NEXT markets. The evolution of the NEXT Worker, NEXT Supply Chain and NEXT frontiers augments employee experiences, business operations, as well as B2B and B2C sales by tokenising data on a distributed ledger and simulating environments with a digital twin connected to IoT and edge and a graphics engine for scenario-based training, design and planning. The interaction from enterprise to the connected customer and commerce now can become one integrated continuum, linking the value chain from the AR-connected worker through greater immersive collaboration and research along the way to offer a more interactive and exciting customer experience journey.
The past two years have accelerated the adoption of virtual technologies in the workplace, where organisations are eager to evolve how they work, engage and collaborate. The Metaverse brings employees together in a shared space that can replicate in-person collaboration, socialisation, engagement and ‘hands-on’ learning from anywhere at any time. It meets employees where they are!
The business case for the Metaverse is clear, based on Accenture research that work is becoming more digital as 70% of employers have already or will soon adopt hybrid work models. The Metaverse is a significant transformational breakthrough, with more than 42% of executives interviewed holding this view. The Metaverse has significantly increased productivity and proficiency as team training can now be undertaken 96% faster than in the past. The Accenture study predicts that by 2030 the digital twin market will be worth more than $184 billion, with digital twins giving real-time insight and shaping how business is conducted.
Embracing the opportunity where the Metaverse meets enterprise to bring value
The Metaverse will enhance the employee experience, optimise collaboration across the value chain and create opportunities across emerging businesses.
The .NEXT worker: elevate the employee experience in an increasingly digital world. The employee is at the centre of each interaction where credentials and certifications enable metaverse navigation, custom learning journeys and simplified processes but also provide an organisation with the correct data to manage, engage and reward talent. The extended reality coupled with decentralised digital identity transforms the employee experience bringing the workplace to the employee and aids in the future of work evolution.
The .NEXT supply chain: the Metaverse brings together the ‘virtual’ and ‘physical’ value chain, creating enhanced efficiency and resiliency while transforming collaboration with partners, customers, and employees. The advent of the Metaverse allows building future-ready supply chains, providing multi-tier visibility, enhanced stability and financial resiliency, and collaboration across partners on trusted, high-quality data. Suppliers can optimise efficiency and sustainable operations across supply chain networks through the visualised flow of physical goods. Collaborative transaction management transforms duplicative, manual back-office processes by reducing process discrepancies and exceptions. Through improved trade finance and liquidity, the Metaverse injects much-needed liquidity and resiliency into global supply chains, focusing on risk reduction.
The .NEXT frontiers: one can now reimagine how emerging businesses collaborate in previously impossible ways. The Metaverse allows the incubation of emerging companies. Organisations can now meet their decarbonisation targets, enhance security through cryptography and cohesively capture the harmony between the digital and physical worlds. They can innovate to achieve energy transition goals by harnessing the Metaverse’s opportunities. Organisations can enhance security through various crypto agility deployments like profiling and cryptographic inventory. The Metaverse expands the barriers to the space economy and all the opportunities it holds while synchronising the digital and physical worlds through embracing robotics to digitise and automate the world.
ACCENTURE SOUTH AFRICA
accenture.com/za-en
