If you didn't know IBM was in the "game" business, don't feel bad -- I didn't know either. But I wanted to find out everything I could about IBM's BPM Simulator -- Innov8 from Phaedra Boinodiris, the Serious Games Program Manager in IBM's Software Group.I had a chance to talk to Phaedra at IBM's IMPACT 2009 conference earlier this month about Innov8 and Farmers Insurance, who is currently piloting version 2.0 of this "serious game".

CS: IBM and gaming in the same sentence is not something I ever expected to see. What exactly is Innov8 at why would anyone be interested in playing it?

PB: About 2 years ago, IBM released Innov8 version 1.0, a one hour playable game for university MBA students to learn about BPM. We just came out with version 2.0 of our game that has 3 "Smarter Planet" scenarios in it: supply chain, traffic and customer service. What we've done here is take a "sim" style game, show people what is the impact to business and be able to teach critical thinking across the organization. The way the anatomy of the game works is you get a video vignette explaining what the problem is, you then work with your fictional team to update your current business process model from a traditional methodology to something that will be able to tackle the event, you bring that model into a simulation where you have the opportunity to tweak different business rules, you get 3 opportunities to simulate and see how it affects your KPIs, then you have to deploy the solution and visualize on a "real-world view" how it impacts your entire ecosystem. For example, you click and you can see what your customers say, what corporate has to say, what the people experience is going to be.

University of Farmers, Claims is piloting the new version of the game. The game educates managers on business process improvement in a risk free environment.

CS: Are any of the training scenarios specific to Farmers Insurance?

PB: There are a number of customers that have asked us for custom versions of the game. They want to be able to show their own business process model. What Sandy Carter (on Twitter: @sandy_carter) is interested in doing is having the next version of the game adopt this open framework so that customers will be able to insert their own business process model in the game and the game would serve up experiences based on the model. We're not customizing the game right now, so Farmers Insurance is using the academic edition of the game which features the Call Center scenario.

CS: When IBM developed the "Call Center" scenario, was the scenario built on Farmers Insurance model?

PB: Not at all. What we did is we worked with teams across divisions within IBM, consultants mostly, to pick out the right events that the gamer would be able to play against that stir up what businesses face today and come up with the right numbers that make sense to the majority of the people that might be playing.

CS: Are there any IBM products embedded into this game?

PB: No, none at all. But there is interest from some of the product managers to have the game act as interface to certain products.