Using Games For Business Training

Chris, from Forterra Systems, talks about using games for business training

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/engage-expo-fortera-systems-interview.mp3

Or listen to it here…

Show Notes:
Interviewer: Hi, I’m here at Engage Expo and with me today is a special guest. How about you introduce yourself?

Chris: Sure, I’m Chris Badger, the Vice-President of Marketing for Forterra Systems?

Interviewer: What is Forterra Systems about?

Chris: We’re about taking visual 3D environments and applying them for business uses, really mostly around collaboration and training. But you can have very imagined environments or very realistic, taking a real story into training or testing around realistic environments like that.

Interviewer: It’s kind of what I call business gaming. What are the benefits of this system, and what have you seen out there? How receptive are people to business gaming?

Chris: Although it’s a very new sort of domain, it’s coming on very strongly, and I’ll cite two different examples where it makes a lot of sense.

So, on the training side, a lot of people might call these asimulation, but you can put people that are new and haven’t gotten on their job yet. It could be an accident or an event to occur, and you have to test and assess how well they respond to that environment.

A quick example could be a soldier who is about to go to Afghanistan, and they are supposed to look for IEDs on the side of the road. You want them to practice that in a virtual environment because doing that realistic training, they could die or get injured. But that’s a quick example of business gaming where you can get people to see the consequence of an action, either a good decision or a bad decision.

Now, on the collaboration side, another area that has come up is modeling business scenarios. So, maybe, you’re running a factory and there’s different decisions you can make. As inputs we can simulate and show an outcome of a certain kind of production, and you can then get reports on financially the impact of that decision. So, think of it as working but it’s applied in a business context.

Interviewer: So, in these collaborative environments, is it where you can open up word documents and stuff like that, or is this something even completely different? Is this more about forecasting than anything else?

Chris: No, the heart of what we’re doing is really what you just raised that you can think of a web conference environment or bringing up a document. It could be a word document. In our environments we’re not constrained by one document. A 3D environment can be filled with, say, six different screens, and there could be any media type you want, PowerPoint, streaming video, any desktop application, word document, a PDF, a web browser application.

So, you can think of a highly collaborative group of people working together. A quick example might be you’re designing a product. There’s a budget. There’s a time line. There’s a specification. All of those are different views of information, so we can display that on different screens.

And so, it brings a team of people together have to figure out how to get this product launched in the time line, but we’ve got to meet the budget, meet the time line, do it with the resources we’ve got. So, this is a quick example of things you cannot do in an audio conference call or web conference call.

Interviewer: Sure.

Chris: And we’re priced very similar to those technologies, so anyone can participate. So, these collaborative processes are really going to get a big productivity boost using these kind of technologies.

Interviewer: So, for your company, do you see then the simulations being bigger in the future or these collaborative environments?

Chris: Good question. I think the collaborative environment is going to be what everyone uses. We all meet today, so this is a new way to have a more productive, more engaging type of meeting. So, everyone will use that.

The simulation area can be a little bit more specialized. You get into how a building is designed today. Literally, a skyscraper in a city might take 10 years from initial design idea to final completion of operation.

And there’s hundreds of constituents involved; vendors, architects and bankers, and so those processes where the ability to bring more intelligence into the process will shorten the cycle time bringing a building to market, making fewer bad decisions. There will be fewer of those, but they’ll have a big impact.

Interviewer: You know, the thing is, in terms of pricing, how accessible is this then to smaller teams? Is this mainly enterprise? Is this going to come to smaller teams? It looks like you have a client, and it seems like things would shift to the web where a lot of companies now have all their information on the web.

You talk about the collaborative environments and being able to pull in that information, it might seem better in a browser or something else. Where’s that going?

Chris: Sure. No, we, in fact, our 3D environment starts out with a web front end. And so, we’ve worked very hard on both packaging and pricing this so that small groups of people can start in very quickly. We have a new offering that’s subscription-based. It’s $60.00 a user month. So, people can say, “Gee, I’ll have a team of 15 people coming together”.

You can invite anybody you want. In five minutes they drop into a 3D environment. So, the point is it’s low priced. We host that environment, so no one has to worry about setting up the server and the infrastructure. They can just invite their colleagues, and they drop into the meeting in five minutes.

So, we’re very focused on getting rapid adoption and just trying it out. You’re right. We started on the enterprise side where we can put this behind the firewall, and it can be accepted through the IT Department. But there’s a lot of complexity there. How do you drive employee authentication and integration of the business systems they care about?

So, that’s why this initial offering we’re calling Meeting Labs, is targeted to getting these small organizations to just experiment. Try it out. It’s very inexpensive. If they like it, if they can grow it, but really any are available for adoption.

Interviewer: That said, do you feel that your business model is kind of prohibitive in that sense? You look at some of these other MMO games and they have like a ‘free to play’. So, you have a base service for free, and then they sell virtual goods. Is that something that you guys have looked at in terms of your service, or is that…

Chris: Yeah, mostly what people are comparing this to is, in fact, a web conference. So, they’ve got WebX, your Go To Meeting. Our pricing at $60.00 user month is very comparable to those, and so any organization that is sort of serious is used to paying a fee like that. You know, a couple hundred dollars a month, a couple thousand dollars a month, it’s just part of how they collaborate.

Again, we’ll probably evolve it, but the first 30 days are free. We want people to come in and try it out. If they like it, great, subscribe. The intent is to get this to be very viral. We’re banking on a better experience where people say, “Wow, I want to give up my web conference environment because this is more fun”.

Interviewer: Speaking of fun, I mean, you do mention WebX, and WebX is pretty popular. Do you put in game mechanics, or are you looking at other game mechanics that will make this more engaging, metrics, stuff like that, that allow people to engage where they’re at in the production process or collaborative process?

Chris: We’re definitely leaving in a lot of social elements into these environments. A quick example is linking in people’s profiles. As two Avatars meet each other, you can quickly check out this other person you are meeting for the first time. What’s their background? What are their interests?

What we’re working towards is helping people build communities. So, I can start to search to find colleagues that I need to bring in to my group so we can sort of optimize for what our group is going to do; maybe, it’s discussing some project. So, the intent, again, is building communities that can really collaborate and work together more effectively when they are geographically distributed.

Again, the big difference over web conferencing is people build relationships in these environments. You see somebody. We can have what we call personalized Avatars, taking a digital photograph of somebody, map it on to an Avatar, so it looks like Chris Badger. People recognize me if they see me in real life, or conversely if you meet people in a virtual world and you meet in the real world, you’ll be able to recognize who that is.

Interviewer: Can you talk about then some of the other benefits of using this environment versus some of the traditional web conferencing tools?

Chris: Yeah, a couple things. I touched on one earlier. There’s a couple key dimensions what we do differently. First is, whenever you get into needing to see multiple panels of information, so my example before of a program where I’ve got a budget. Maybe, it’s an Excel spreadsheet. I’ve got a spec in a word document. In a web conference environment you can only present one document at a time.

Intervewer: Sure.

Chris: In our environment you can have multiple panels of information. You can leave them up there all the time, and so you can operate these 24×7. So, that’s one thing you can’t do in a web environment.

The second is: let’s imagine we’ve got 10 people. We want to break out into little side discussions. In our environments you can literally have side discussions, brain storm on something and then reconvene. So, the point being, we could have buildings and rungs that have very much – do what we do in real life. You can start to have a variety of different ways of interacting with each other and then reconvening. You just can’t do that in a web conference environment.

Interviewer: Where do you see the business of gaming going then?

Chris: I think I’m biased, but I think it’s literally in three to probably seven years, this will start to take over a good chunk of the audio and web conferencing. People will see anything they can do in a web and audio conferencing environment, they can do equally or better in our environment.

We have telepathy integration, so OK, maybe, you’ve got 10 people but two of them are in an airport. They can’t log into the environment, but they have a mobile phone. They can, at least, participate in the discussion.

So, I literally look at this as more of a core communications infrastructure that will take over. There will be specific application areas. We’re very high in simulation of buildings that comes in and sort of intelligent information that comes out from gaming in a given scenario. I’ve gained some output from that to help us make better business decisions.

Interviewer: Very cool. And where can people find out more information about your company, maybe, even use your product?

Chris: Sure. So, our website, our company name again is Forterra Systems, f-o-r-t-e-r-r-a Systems. The website is a little bit different. So, it’s www.forterrainc with an i-n-c .com.

Interviewer: Thank you very much.