Serious Games Summit DC 2006: Corporate Games Audit
Serious Games Summit DC 2006 Corporate Games Audit- Chris Oltyan
Northrop Grumman
Mark Conger first stated Northrop Grumman’s (NG) position. Primarily a defense industry giant, NG has around 125,000 employees and $31 billion in sales a year. It's a big operation, and is always looking to have an advantage over the competition. As such, the company is one year into their initiative currently attempting to bring game technology inside the corporation. NG has a 5-10 year development cycle for moving the applications created into the marketplace for both internal and external needs. Since the workforce who is game proficient is quickly becoming a dominant factor in the workplace, a 5-10 year cycle has moved from a interesting vision to an urgent need.
NG first started evaluating the core technology associated with games, and tried to see where they could use it. The “games” stigma negatively impacted their progress, so a simple name change to “Interactive Media” was made and uses for it were expanded. Rather than restricting it to web focused education programs, it has been expanded to help create proposal methodology, dramatically improving the ability to navigate complex government bits. However after looking at it, NG realized that the technology was relatively easy to grasp, but implementing it was painful.
70% of the company are baby boomers, and just didn’t seem to get games. When talking about the workforce, which is dedicated to the military space, and hasn’t heard of America’s Army, Michael was openly accepting of the fact that NG needs help when trying to integrate games into their business. So, the company revised its view of goals of identifying and evaluating game technology to that of culture change agents, and brought in outside experts to help facilitate the change.
Brian Gomez was brought in to be an internal evangelist. Games, often viewed as a kids toy, have a difficult challenge in becoming an accepted part of NG’s culture. Starting at the top helped, with the company visionaries easily grasping both the need and power of gaming technologies, but middle management, where the work needed to be done, was more skeptical. White papers, research, case studies, and even a documentary were created to help move things along.
Difficulties also included a false perception of costs. With parents purchasing $59.99 games, the impression was that games are cheap to make ($339 million price tags on a single plane can influence numbers like that) so a false sense of what was possible existed. This was surmounted by forming partnerships with academia and provide extensive internal networking opportunities. This combination overcame territorial departments who were reluctant to commit funds to the efforts.
Eventually, the company was able to overcome the resistance to change, even though no one wanted to be the first, and thus was able to use small initial successes to sell big later on.
