“If you can measure it you can improve it” is an old business adage that is easily applied to performance criteria such as manufacturing output levels or sales quotas. But, how can you apply measurement metrics to the more subjective sciences of collaboration and business success? Simple, the answer is “gamification.”
The following chart assumes an organizational performance level of 30 percent. By encouraging users to adopt social software through gamification, we have the opportunity to improve performance and drive bottom-line returns.
What is gamification?
Gamification is the application of game design techniques to business processes aimed at encouraging user adoption and participation. This is typically achieved by:
- Achievement badges
- Achievement levels
- Reward systems
- Leader boards
Why gamification?
The reasons are:
- Gamification has the potential to unlock wasted talent and streamline business processes through enhanced collaboration.
- Work processes rely increasingly on interacting with colleagues, partners, and customers in social networks; to manage performance, new performance management metrics are needed.
- Younger and older generations are now more engaged in playing online games and they identify with gamification and reward systems..
- The gamification of business objectives and their breakdown into key performance indicators provides a new way for organizations to drive performance improvement.
The term gamification in some way perhaps trivializes what we are trying to achieve. Take the point of view of an inflexible or unprogressive manager: “I don’t want our people playing games on work time!” This is the same person who objected to the introduction of instant messaging saying “I don’t want our people chatting and wasting time.” The benefits of instant messaging, presence awareness, and screenshare are now universally acknowledged. So, nothing is new here, other than gamification, which simply faces the technology adoption curve.
How do we get started with gamification?
Go to gamification.org and to the gamification blog (gamification.co), which also provides useful reference material. IBM Connections users can visit kudosbadges.com site.
Having decided that the idea of implementing social software makes sense, next ensure that your social software strategy includes ways of measuring and rewarding users for their participation. The alignment of collaboration goals with business objectives is key. Having gamified collaboration goals, any business process can be similarly gamified.
For example, a marketing/sales process could be engineered in the following way: 500 letters – Direct Mail Badge
500 follow up phonecalls – Telemarketing Badge
50 meetings – Meeting Badge
20 proposals – Proposal Badge
1 order – Sales Badge
5 orders – Sales Guru Badge
The measurement of performance across this simple sales/marketing process may draw on data from disparate systems. For example, if the organization uses SAP, the lodgement of a purchase order attributable to the sales person will click the counter on the user’s Sales Badge. The integration of these systems is achieved through a gamification engine that displays progress in the place where it’s most needed, the social portal:
Organizations that are invested in business process management, Balanced Scorecard, or Six Sigma principles will have a head start in that much of the performance metrics for gamification will already be in place.
2012 gamification predictions
These are several predictions:
- Organizations will embrace gamification.
- Gamification will continue to thrive in the social software space.
- Gamification will penetrate all business processes and systems.
Summary
Gamification offers a serious capability to improve organizational performance. Early adopters will benefit most; those who choose to be laggards will face increasing competitive pressure from those who embrace gamification and invest in the analysis of their business processes and structured measurement and reward systems.
Tim Royle is an Executive Director of ISW, Australian based IBM Premier Partner. ISW is an award-winning, pure-play IBM Business Partner that designs, implements, and supports solutions based on WebSphere, ICS, Tivoli, Rational, Information Management, and Cognos technologies. He has worked with IBM Collaboration Solutions since 1992 and has spoken at events such as Collective Intelligence, LCTY, AUSLUG, and Lotusphere. Tim is a member of the IBM Social Business social media IBM Redbooks team and spends his time focused on implementing successful social software solutions.
Tim is an IBM Redbooks Thought Leader 
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