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IBM plays games with BPM


By Alex Handy
March 26, 2009 — 
The annual Game Developers Conference is, perhaps, not the place you'd expect to find IBM discussing business process management. But the company does have games to play. A year and a half ago, IBM released a game about BPM and sent copies off to MBA schools around the country. The project was so successful that version 2.0 will be arriving in May, opening the world of BPM to an audience outside of the classroom.

Phaedra Boinodiris, serious games product manager for the IBM software group, said that the BPM training game, Innov8 1.0, focused on teaching business students about the potential of BPM. Her work is part of a growing marketplace where videogames are being created to train workers and students.

“What it really did was teach the A-to-Z of business process management,” said Boinodiris “You played as a consultant dropped into this a virtual company. The CEO is telling you that you have to figure out how to solve problems with the business flow.”

Despite its presentation as a first-person shooter, Innov8 1.0 was not action-packed. Players negotiated an office environment and spoke to various employees to determine the needs of the business.

Boinodiris said that version 2.0 will be less focused on the white-collar world. “We're infusing it with a massive amount of new content based on our Smarter Planet initiative, showing how our IT solutions across the board solve infrastructure problems,” she said, adding that it showcases “how people can use IT solutions to solve traffic flows, create smarter supply chains and provide smarter customer service. How can you leverage BPM and leverage SOA to lower the amount of environmental impact for you suppliers?”

Innov8 2.0 will offer three scenarios based on these problems. For the supply chain scenario, players will set up business process rules to create an effective and environmentally friendly sequence of suppliers for a hardware store. Just before a hurricane hits, players running the hardware store will set up their business rules so that they can adapt and change as the situation demands.

Boinodiris and her team are based out of IBM's WebSphere software group, so the new game will also be a marketing tool for IBM's SOA stack. But she was quick to point out that the new game will not be a training simulator for IBM's WebSphere Business modeler. “It's not a game that could show you how to use the modeler. It shows you the power of it,” she said.

Serious business
IBM wasn't the only company outside of the video games industry selling its software to the gamers. The game world has awakened to popular development tools, such as DevTrack, Electric Cloud and Perforce, all of which had booths at the show. Versant was also at the event to hawk its databases and services to massively multiplayer game companies.

Many of the talks at the show were in sync with these enterprise companies. Talks included “Data Architecture and Asset Management for Scalable Asset Production Workflows and Pipelines,” “Security and Privacy in Games," and “Stretching Beyond Entertainment: The Role of Games in Personal and Social Change.”


Related Search Term(s): BPM, IBM


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Comments

03/30/2009 08:00:22 AM EST

I'm looking forward to try out Innov8. We share this mission. We recently published a book to communicate the value of BPM beyond the classrooms. It's a scientific novel that introduces the reader to BPMN as the modeling language while showing the application (and the value) in a context at the same time. Check out http://bpmn-book.com

GermanyAlexander Grosskopf


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