Combining MMOWGLI Social Media Brainstorming with Lexical Link Analysis (LLA) to Strengthen the DoD Acquisition Process

MMOWGLI (Massive Multiplayer Online Wargame Leveraging the Internet) sponsored by the Office of Naval Research, is an online game platform designed to elicit collective intelligence from an engaged pool of world-wide players. In the past the Naval Postgraduate School hosted a series of successful games including piracyMMOWGLI (2011), energyMMOWGLI (2012) and biiMMOWGLI (2013) which built the critical mass of players needed to find creative solutions to real-life, difficult business problems such as piracy, energy and business innovation initiatives (bii). NPS also leveraged MMOWGLI with the analytic framework of Lexical Link Analysis (LLA) to link the game data to the concepts documented in two business processes (i.e. improve DoD energy efficiency and improve future open systems architecture [OSA] strategy]. We demonstrated the synergy of using both tools to gain faster viability of new ideas to improve the acquisition process, and sorted the idea cards that might be good candidates for further investigation. We then determined that the majority of Navy programs are affected by (or critically dependent on) energy issues but goals and terms are handled inconsistently. It is evident that MMOWGLI together with LLA is an important tool for comparing and considering innovative ideas using social media games to improve acquisition processes.