Episode 74, 4K Gaming was recorded on Friday, September 27th, 2013.
In this almost-lost episode, Michael M introduces Sandy Kearney as a Game At Work.biz co-host. Since Sandy used the term “HD of Gaming” during the recording of the podcast, it seemed a small editorial liberty to upgrade to 4K. Game on!
Sandy’s core work is with e426.org — assisting small businesses, IEEE and universities on the use of emerging and innovative technology. She is also a professor at Villanova University teaching leadership, business and emerging technology. Furthermore, she also teaches emerging technology and runs the emergency planning and professional studies programs at Immaculata University.
Wargaming and Peacegaming
Emergency planning lends itself very well to running board exercises to plan what would Hurricane Sandy look like, and how it would play out. Using new technology to explore the logical path forward through games helps to position first responders as well as create a better emergency preparedness plan for the university.
HD of Gaming
We can see instant results through visuals and dashboards that would not have been understandable ten years ago. This instant feedback allows for faster process awareness, both the detailed documented processes as well as the undocumented ones. Sandy noted that the best university responses to crises, both natural disasters and man-made ones, have been social media, noting “the best university responses have been social media, better than arming police officers”. Whereas the younger generations have quickly adopted and embraced these social new technologies, others are slower to make full use, and these emergency preparedness simulations can open the eyes and speed adoption.
Not just process modeling — process mining!
Following on the idea of emergency preparedness, Sandy and Michael explored the importance of collecting the data to analyze at a later time as an important capability. Because of the data capture, it is now possible to better understand how the data is joined to the process, determine behavior when people play, how the play, and look at the larger scenarios, the geopolitical framework, local crisis response and better understand the full ecosystem. This concept is not foreign in the space of business process modeling, where business people (as opposed to technologists) can make changes to the business models and have the underlying technology change the process to match the business reality. Professor Will van der Aalst’s research on process mining allows for this kind of analysis, on steroids. Every process step could be captured with a time & date stamp and the fuller analysis of the complete set of transactional events could create a process model that is much more like reality than a model created from scratch. Professor van der Aalst’s work surfaces the “elephant paths” — the way that people actually execute a process, rather than the proscribed steps that the desk procedures say that a process should execute.
Institutional Protocols
These elephant paths — very similar to the way that university students cut across a lawn to get from point A to point B in a more efficient way — demonstrate the inherent challenges with institutional protocols, and the efforts of people to circumvent them when they become a hinderance. Sandy uses the example of IT wireless network security, describing a situation where the difficulty in getting connected to a wireless network bogs down the the user to the point where they seek out a wired ethernet connection, which is much simpler to plug in and get to the Internet. Circling back to emergency planning, these kinds of data collection about what people actually do when confronted with a challenge, coupled with location based data could surface some very interesting insight needed to tighten controls as well as provide for more rapid communication, done in unconventional ways.
Selected show links:
e426.org the Innovation Corps for America — http://e426.org/
Villanova University Department of Computing Sciences — http://csc.villanova.edu
Immaculata University — http://www.immaculata.edu
IEEE — http://www.ieee.org/index.html
IBM BPM Symposium 2013 — http://www-05.ibm.com/de/events/bpm-symposium/index.html
Process Mining — http://www.processmining.org
BPM Symposium 2013 interview with Prof. Wil van der Aalst (auf Deutsch / German) — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PW16JqxftKw&feature=youtu.be
Technische Universiteit Eindhoven — http://www.tue.nl
Professor Wil van der Aalst — http://wwwis.win.tue.nl/~wvdaalst/
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