IBM produces Serious Game to promote BPM
General March 31st. 2009, 2:02pmIn the context of our research we recently discussed a serious game to communicate BPM knowledge. Now I learned about IBM’s Innov8 project. An adventure in which you have to ‘align your actions with the management strategy’ and ‘streamline your processes’. If anything, they know how to advertise it. I simply love the trailer.
IBM designed the game to complement classroom trainings for students and professionals. We all know that there are more people touched by BPM than usually sit in a classroom for BPM training. I think a game is a great idea and well suited to address those people as well.
The opening scene reminded me a lot of our first chapter in The Process. It’s this book on BPMN we recently published:) Like IBM we want to combine entertainment with knowledge transfer. We use the style of a scientific novel to teach process modeling and show it’s application.
We need more of this. To spread the word it’s not enough to put it down once for everybody. We need to create proper learning material to address all groups. I’m looking forward to try out the new Innov8 soon. You’re welcome to try out an excerpt from our book right now.
2009-03-31 at 7.58 pm
Innov8 would be a very nice and usefule serious game – if the “save” button worked.
For the current version you need at least 2 hours to finish the game. If you want to use it in a university course, in which you usually have 1.5 hours lessons, you need to be able to save the game in order to continue next time. The user forum is full of complaints of lecturers who would love to use the game for teaching, but who can’t because of the saving problem. Apparently, no one from IBM has looked into the user forum for years.
I cannot understand why IBM puts lots of work into developing that game, and then doesn’t care about fixing a minor bug, nor reading and answering posts in the game’s forum.
Hopefully the next version of the game will be better in that respect.
My experiences with Innov8 are described in http://kurze-prozesse.de/?p=60 (German).
P.S.: The BPMN novel is a good idea.
2009-04-01 at 9.34 am
Thanks for the hint to your review. It’s indeed helpful to get an impression. Let’s see what version 2.0 can do.
2009-05-09 at 9.03 pm
I liked the video – its very well produced – even though this one is not as well produced by me, its a bit more usefull