Lara Croft gets down to business

It had to happen. IBM, still a venerable name in the computer industry, has taken yet another step to get down there with the kids. Not content with committing resources to Linux and the cause of bottom-up programming, it has entered the video game business.

Innov8 is a 3D game with which students can learn how to relate business strategy to IT. It’s a clunky name, and the graphics, as far as I can make them out from stills on IBM’s site, are pretty clunky too. The “complete cast” ­ six, actually ­ of Innov8 characters contains two male blue shirts (both open-necked) and also what appears to be a humanoid Martian with a quiff.

IBM is certainly committed to games and gaming. Already, its engineers collaborate with those at Second Life creators Linden Lab. The goal: to allow you to stay the same person and conduct secure transactions in whichever virtual world you choose to move to.

It’s a similar story of intent with Innov8. IBM’s Academic Initiative programme wants more than 2,000 of the world’s universities to sign up, for free, to that game.

IBM believes that the gap between management skills and the IT sort is one of the main barriers to the advent of service-oriented architecture (SOA). That’s why its SOA people have developed Innov8, a “state-of-the-art 3D business simulator that takes you through the entire lifecycle of discovery, collaboration, and optimisation of a company’s business processes”.

Nor is IBM alone in its efforts. As the company points out, some estimate that by 2012 more than 100 of Fortune magazine’s 500 largest global firms will be into gaming as a means of business education. At the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, David Rejeski, director of the deliciously titled Serious Games Initiative, maintains that we’re seeing the rise of a movement of thousands of gamers dedicated to applying games to fields as diverse as medical treatment and better government.

Should we celebrate all this? Well, if anyone is going to make virtual life imitate business, I’d rather it was IBM. Yet I wonder whether skills shortages really are a problem, and whether the ludic approach to the business use of IT really encourages in-depth understanding. Pay IT people more, and improve mainstream teaching, say I.

My other doubt concerns IBM. In Hawthorne, upstate New York, its labs do great stuff in speech-to-text engines. In Zurich, its labs perform experiments around the binary magnetic properties of individual iron atoms ­ an astonishing feat of miniaturisation.

These things will do more for the world than Lara Croft meets business process management.