XR UK Public Sector Adoption barriers

Hey all, hope you are all well.
This newsletter was supposed to be sent last week, but it seems like I wrote it up and forgot to press send!!
Last week I had the opportunity to be among other XR (VR/AR/MR) industry professionals where we discussed some of the challenges this sector is facing to create widespread adoption within the Public Sector.

Lack of central strategy inside organisations

This is probably the most widespread challenge around the UK Public Sector. What we commonly see is multiple small deployments across departments with no real central overview or process to get those POCs ongoing. this generates a couple of problems:
- Hard to keep track of ROI on Immersive deployments and money spent on projects.
- Duplicated efforts on the same use cases.
- Lack of training and support for staff.
- Security and Governance

How to fix this?

Organisations that want to be serious about generating value from their Immersive Tech deployments need to create a central strategy and guidelines for deployments and POCs. Some key points include:
- Create a process for staff to submit ideas. I would start with a questionnaire to understand more about the project and their experience with Immersive.The central group would then be able to assess: is this use case in the strategy for the organisation, has it been deployed elsewhere, are there any technical limitations or any big barriers to adoption and what is the financial commitment needed (headsets, training, licenses and custom development)
- List of supported XR devices which include central management through Intune, QfB, etc
- Guidelines for accessibility and hygiene, best practices for teaching
- A network of champions/super users that are able to provide training for new users

Regulation and courage to innovate

Regulation is always quite an awkward topic as there are actually two opposing sides on this issue, both with valid arguments. Those for will mention that regulation will create strict guidelines that will create more security and focus around certain use cases. I am of the opposite view, where I believe that less regulation will allow both industry and champions within organisations to be more creative and attempt new use cases that could create a real impact within an industry.
One of the people I met at the event is a South Korean professor that has decades of experience in Immersive technologies, and one of his main arguments is that SK are so advanced in this area because they are not afraid to try and innovate, even in more complicated fields such as healthcare. Let's be honest, the UK has not been a great tech and innovation hotspot recently, especially if we compare to emerging nations such as the UAE where there are commitments of 10s of Billions for the metaverse space, whilst the UK is quite uninterested in this topic.
Building up on this, having worked in the UK Public Sector sphere over the past two years, I believe that there truly is a desire to innovate from some organisations but there is also a demand to minimise the risk of investments, which means the best move for them is to wait for others to come up with sufficient positive evidence in order to allow investment into an innovative area. Courage to innovate is essential to fasttrack the Immersive Tech sector.

I look forward to meeting more incredible people in this space and keep the conversations going. The vast majority of people I met have a positive outlook for the future of Immersive. Investments (not in the UK) are growing at great pace and use cases are starting to mature with a great bank of evidence being produced.

See you next week,
Davi, MetaVisions