"Businesses have learned some hard lessons," says Steve Prentice, vice president and fellow at Gartner. "They need to realize that virtual worlds mark the transition from webpages to Web places, and a successful virtual presence starts with people, not physics."

The adoption of virtual worlds for the enterprise began picking up steam this year, buoyed by the success of Second Life, a 3-D environment in the consumer space where people interact with one another as avatars (virtual representations of themselves). Other consultancies, such as Forrester, predicted that virtual worlds would rival the Internet in overall importance to businesses.

Many companies implemented virtual worlds to help with internal collaboration, including Sun Microsystems, whose MPK20 provides a virtual extension to the company's corporate campus in Menlo Park, Calif. (Read "Companies Explore Virtual Worlds As Collaboration Tools.")

Despite the high failure rate, the research, which was released at the Gartner Emerging Trends Symposium/ITxpo 2008 in Barcelona, Spain, did indicate that virtual worlds will catch on as companies understand what types of use cases work best for implementing them.

By 2012, around 70 percent of organizations will have set up private virtual worlds, Gartner predicts. Virtual worlds set up for employees to collaborate internally will have a high success rate because of "lower expectations, clearer objectives and better constraints."

The other upside to virtual worlds for the enterprise: cost. According to Gartner, the cost of implementing a corporate virtual platform averages $50,000, and cheaper trials can cost $5,000. The report argues that this low cost will encourage more experimentation by businesses.

-C.G. Lynch

CIOs Reap Realignment Benefits

On the MOVE In May, three CIOs earned promotions amid management realignments at their companies: At AmerisourceBergen, senior VP and CIO Tom Murphy was given additional responsibility for the pharmaceutical company's multiyear process improvement project, including a new ERP system.

Flowers Foods, a maker of supermarket baked goods, made CIO Vyto Razminas a senior VP. Don Nelson was promoted from VP of capabilities development to CIO at graphic design services provider VistaPrint. The realignments will position each company for growth and, in AmerisourceBergen's case, to also streamline its organizational structure.

CIOs are well-positioned to benefit from organizational realignments, says Paul Groce, the leader of executive search firm CTPartners' CIO practice. CIOs oversee technology for all functions inside the company, he says, so they have a firsthand view of how IT can "drive huge efficiencies" by aggregating and consolidating disparate finance, HR and supply chain systems. Such changes can be the catalyst for new organizational structures."The CIO can be the enabler of the realignment," says Groce. "If the CIO of a multinational, multidivisional company can convince everyone that compliance, HR and financial systems can run on a single platform, the CEO may decide to consolidate."