While listening to the radio on my way home from work just the other day, I happened upon a news story about a school using “game-based learning” to teach problem-solving and communication skills. You can probably tell from the subject matter what station I was tuned to, but I digress.
What caught my attention initially was the statement “Videos games don’t come with instructions, but have you ever seen a kid not figure out how to play?” While the premise that video games could be a key to a kind of “21st century literacy” is intriguing by itself, it got me thinking about how radically our thought and resulting work processes have changed over just the past decade.
More often than not, it seems we no longer think and work in straight lines, repeatedly traveling well-worn paths from start to finish as in the past. Instead, the emerging behavior is driven more by dynamic context, with far less reliance on knowing upfront where you need to end up or how to get there. It is nearly impossible to ignore these changes, particularly if you have kids for whom this new paradigm has gone well beyond second nature, as suggested by this news story. Video games, and even things like the search engines that we take for granted nowadays, really bring this home.
So, you ask, what does this have to do with ERP systems? (Ok, maybe you didn’t ask this, but I will.) Why is it that the way we interact with many computer-based systems has changed so substantially in many areas, but not so much in traditional business software? Is there significant value to be realized by applying the lessons learned from software aimed more at the mainstream, such as video games and search engines?
For more on the original story that inspired these thoughts, click on the following link:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128081896
ebjelovs
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Beta & Controlled Release - A Critical Phase of the PDLC
