Millions of people are playing Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs), a computer game genre where thousands of players interact daily in highly complex virtual world environments. These players self-organize, develop skills, and acquire various roles. MMOGs appear to mirror the complexity of the business context while offering unique technology capabilities that appear to encourage group participation and emergent leadership. Managing a remote workforce across different time zones, geography and culture requires effective virtual collaboration and management of communication, coordination challenges and control issues. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to explore the unique technology capabilities of MMOGs and propose how these may be applicable to virtual project teams (VPTs) for ameliorating the challenges of managing a distributed workforce and provide insights into the nature of next generation collaboration technologies that could be used by VPTs.
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/khazanchi/50/
Published in the Proceedings of the 4th Annual Midwest Association for Information Systems Conference.
Excerpted from Owens, D. and Khazanchi, D. (2009, May 22-23). “My Guild, My Team: Applying the Technology Capabilities of Massively Multiplayer Online Games to Virtual Project Teams”, Proceedings of the 4th Annual Midwest Association for Information Systems Conference (MWAIS 2009), Madison, South Dakota, © 2009. Used with permission from Association for Information Systems, Atlanta, GA; 404-413-7444; www.aisnet.org. All rights reserved.