In the book, we describe business motivation models, and how those models can be simulated. When you simulate a motivation model, you can try different strategies, and understand the potential outcomes of each. A “strategy sim”—the simulation of a business motivation model—is a particularly effective tool for training, for bringing a group of people to a new understanding of the dynamics of a business.

But how should a strategy sim be delivered to the people who want to use it? Strategy sims want to be delivered as web applications, with a user pointing his browser at the right sim URL, trying a variety of different potential tactics, and exploring the resulting impacts on his business. The web makes business sims easy to access, no harder than looking up something in Wikipedia or buying something on Amazon.

I became convinced of the value of web-based strategy sims in the mid-1990s, while performing some management consulting work for BellSouth in Atlanta. As you may know, BellSouth was one of the “baby bells” resulting from the breakup of AT&T in 1984. BellSouth was based in Atlanta, and offered local telephony to customers in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and other states in the southeast United States. BellSouth has since been acquired by (the new) AT&T.

In 1995, my client at BellSouth was interested in conducting a two day training seminar for all managers in the company. The purpose of the seminar was to introduce the BellSouth management to some of the changes taking place in the telecom market, and to prepare the company for some coming transformations in their business. The seminar was centered around a playable simulation, a strategy sim that reflected the ideas of the BellSouth thought leaders.

We created this sim for them. In the sim the user could make investments in consumer broadband (then a radical idea), make pricing decisions for long distance (then a rather expensive service, not bundled for free with landlines and wireless as it is today), and other telecom decisions. The user simulated forward for six years, from 1996-2002 (!). Each year the user could investigate what had happened, make decisions, and then advance to the next year.

The sim was used competitively. The participants were divided into teams. Each team explored what had happened, and discussed what should be done. The teams competed against each other, each trying to create the best end result for the simulated BellSouth. And the competition engaged them: they wanted to beat their friends and colleagues, and many spent extra hours in the evening learning the sim, and in the process, learning about changes in the telecom competitive landscape.

In creating the sim, we focused on the user interface, making it very attractive and intuitive. Actually my old friend Nadine Carroll did all the heavy lifting on the user interface. She wrote it in Visual Basic—an obvious choice in those days. Ed Vail and I wrote the model using the strategy simulation tool Powersim. To the user it was a standalone Windows 3.1 application, with the model and simulation engine completely hidden inside the app.

For the training seminar we needed the sim to run on 150 laptops. BellSouth supplied the laptops, shipping them to my office in Boston. Nadine had created a installer application with all the necessary DLLs. Of course this was before CDROMs were common, so the installer was delivered on a series of five diskettes. We copied the diskettes, then set up an assembly line to install the app on all the laptops.

What a pain! And it did not even work right. The laptops were not identical, and the app worked on most, but failed on some. The root cause was a DLL conflict (of course), and Nadine had to figure out the offending DLL and devise a workaround.

While installing the sim on the 150 laptops, I began to fantasize about a different architecture. What if the sim were a web application instead of a Windows application? The user interface could run in a web browser, and the simulation would run on a server. No installation would be required. The user would point his browser at the right URL and play the simulation. The server could even manage the competition, tracking the high score and which team had achieved it.

The next year I joined Powersim Corporation, and we created the product Powersim Metro to achieve that vision. Metro allowed someone to create a simulation and deploy it as a web application. Metro was not a great success as a product; it was a typical version 1.0 product that partly achieved its objectives and partly missed. And it sold poorly, even for the smallish niche of modeling tools.

My Powersim colleagues Michael Bean and Will Glass later created a company that has enjoyed some success with this kind of web-based simulation environment. Their product Forio Broadcast allows you to create a simulation with a web user interface. The model is simulated on a server, either on one of Forio’s servers or your own. The user interface is written in some combination of HTML, Javascript, and Flash, and runs in a browser. The result can be a sim that feels very smooth and natural, easy to access from anywhere.