It’s easy to have a lot of meetings without any thought to money and the cost associated with that time. This was a link shared by Lance Ennen in an O’Reilly Webinar, “Radical Career Success in a Down Economy.”

Meeting Cost Ticker

Our last seminar on serious games was quite enjoyable. Dr. Pippa Avery asked us to brainstorm a serious game that we would like to make. Our class consists of individuals with fairly diverse backgrounds including computer science, digital media, traditional arts, journalism, and myself, the lone business/marketing student.

My experiences and coursework through the College of Business has exposed me to more than my fair share of “serious games.” In MKT 316 we played New Shoes, which was a marketing simulation game surrounding a shoe company. The focus of the game was on marketing principles such as forecasting demand, deciding on advertising and promotion budgets and managing product quality in both domestic and foreign markets.

In MGT 496 this semester, we are playing yet another shoe simulator called BSG Online (I’m not sure where everyone’s fascination with shoe simulation games is coming from) that focuses on building and executing strategies for a multinational shoe conglomerate. This game is much more complex in that, each company/team is able to control the amount of production, product support, imports/exports, and product development, on top of the marketing principles covered in the other game. This game has so many options that if you are actually able to grasp the cause-effect relationship your decisions have on the game, you’d be well on your way to understanding what is needed to execute a global, multinational strategy within an organization.

While these games have educational value, they are certainly lacking in engagement. Yes, they are serious games but who says they can’t be fun as well? After all, a game is meant to be fun and it allows learning to happen through hands-on interactions. If there isn’t going to be some element of fun and enjoyment, why use the medium at all?

Our Game
Our group began to discuss ideas for a game we would like to create. I’ve always loved playing MMORPG games (a past addiction of mine) including Star Wars Galaxies and World of Warcraft because they are so complex and offer a wide variety of roles for players and encourages interaction with others in order for you to be successful.

Our idea builds on a world such as those in MMORPGs and SecondLife and basically, after building a character in the game, you start at the bottom of the social ladder in the community. Your actions influence your rise (or fall) along the social ladder, much as we experience in real life. This concept is already seen in a game like The Sims but by adding the MMORPG aspect you again encourage interaction with others to achieve synergy. The actions of yourself and others will hopefully bring value to the both parties and the community as a whole (1+1=3). Ok. So far, this sounds like games that are already out there and most of them are not overt teaching tools. Our biggest addition to the genre is the idea of a “current event engine.”

The current event engine will generate outside forces that will once again influence the actions and behaviors of the players. There is a basic human need to collect things which can be seen in games such as Pokemon, Animal Crossing, and most MMORPGs, but how would that need change when faced with real-world scenarios like economic depressions, epidemics, and more subtle changes like the changes in political leaders and more. You could be playing the game one day and be on your way to becoming a movie star, a corporate bigwig, or a hermit in the forest and the next day, the environment could change.

This game would be fairly complex to build in such a manner that the game does not become predictable or repetitive. Obviously we would not want the same influencing events happening over and over again and they should occur to a degree that is fairly realistic (we won’t have multiple economic recessions in a year, get hit by hurricanes every day, etc.) Fortunately, not everything that influences our game’s environment and characters needs to be negative.

Other Ideas
Considering my experience with business simulation games, there is a lot of room for improvement in terms of making a game that allows for learning of business strategy, marketing, and sales without being absolutely mind-numbing. The interactivity of BSG Online is actually limited by the technology it is built on. The entire game is built on Microsoft Excel using complex series of views, macros, and sheets to create a game. Games like Roller Coaster Tycoon allow people of all ages to “learn” the mechanics of running a business but in a very oversimplified sense in order to appeal to a mass audience. A more complex game, a mixture of Roller Coaster Tycoon and BSG Online would prove to be a very engaging and powerful teaching tool with business schools.

David Heinemeier Hansson at Startup School 08 on The A Secret to Making Money.

His presentation is to the point and reinforces the direction I’m heading while working on my own web app in the little “spare/free” time I find. Quite inspiring.

Reno Collective is now live at www.renocollective.com. Ed Adkins and I will be adding much more content over the next couple days with our press releases. It will be the home to any of our announcements as well as general coworking and microbusiness news.

It is a great feeling to see how far we have come, especially considering it all started with Ed and I sitting in a coffee shop working away on projects in between our cups of coffee, tea, and beer.

Our companion site is also up. Please feel free to join the Reno Collective Ning if you are interested in using us as your work space this Fall or if you’d just like to show support for what we are trying to accomplish.

I’ve been working with Salesforce.com for just over a year and it is no where near the same system it was when I started working at Twelve Horses. In the past year, I have seen the CRM evolve to include a full developer platform, Force.com, with Apex code allowing developers to create complex business logic for data manipulation, maintaining data quality and the ability to communicate with external services [see Google Data API/Toolkit below]. Force.com then grew to include Visualforce, which grants users the ability to create custom interfaces that use Salesforce.com metadata. Combining Salesforce objects, Apex code and Visualforce, developers are now able to develop in the model-view-controller (MVC) architectural pattern. Simply, MVC allows for the developer to separate their code into layers for ease of maintenance and further development.

I just got back from Tour de Force, which featured a few exciting announcements, especially the Google Data API Toolkit, which allows developers to create, manipulate and pull data from Google applications like YouTube, Calendar, Spreadsheets, Docs and more.

I’ve been developing a project management application through Twelve Horses. Dreamforce 2008 is fast approaching and I would love to be able to package the application and make it available via the AppExchange before then.

Kingsley Joseph asked an interesting question on Twitter today that had me thinking about optimizing business processes:

“what does CRM mean to you? most definitions I find on the web are next to useless”
Kingsley2

He had quite a few responses, mine was as follows:

“@kingsley I would define CRM as any system used to manage customer touchpoints and value derived from those interactions-products/email/etc”
colinloretz

My response to Kingsley was very short. It had to be in order to stay within the 140 character limit of Twitter. As he pointed out in his reply, Twitter’s restraint can be useful for receiving a clear definition of a complex system like CRM, which if you haven’t decoded it yet, is customer relationship management usually applied to customer relationship management software. If you Google “CRM” or its expanded form, you’ll find all sorts of definitions, each one more convoluted than the last. It doesn’t need to be complex.

Customers provide a business with value. Using a grocery store as an example, optimizing touchpoints, anywhere a business and customer interact, can increase variables such as how many times a customer visits the store or how much they spend during each trip, resulting in a higher customer lifetime value.

Some other responses to Kingsley’s questions included:

“CRM is philosophy & strategy that puts the customer at the center, maximizing long-term value for both customer and business”
Gokubi

“CRM requires concrete, measurable goals and clear reporting to validate increasing ‘value.’”
dschach

“CRM is a philosophy & a business strategy, supptd.by a system & technology, designed to improve human interactions in a biz. environment”
pgreenbe

And at a very high level, which probably falls in line with many company mission statements:

“CRM will help you save the world…if that’s what you want to do.”
Gokubi

I spend a lot of time developing solutions using Salesforce.com, customer relationship software that is offered using a monthly software-as-a-service model. Many people would probably argue that being a programmer, knowledgeable in Javascript, HTML and Salesforce’s own Apex code, a derivative of Java, is all you need to develop solutions for the platform. An education in computer science will prepare most programmers for the type of logic that is needed in day-to-day business scenarios. Many businesses could actually benefit from a programmatic approach to business. In fact, applying principles from open source and agile development philosophies to business can have amazing results. That discussion is for another article.

Software can help a business but technology should not be thrown at a problem to make it go away. In most of the businesses I’ve worked with, there have always been real world processes to optimize before implementing the technology.

Real world experience can be one of the best teachers, but adding textbook learning from areas like Six Sigma or project management to a developer’s skill set will allow a small team, or even an individual, to optimize a business that can be further supported by technology like Salesforce.com or Microsoft Sharepoint.