Gamification of Business Processes: What’s your take?
If you’re unfamiliar with the term, ‘Gamification’ is the use of game mechanics — e.g. status, leader-boards, currency, and badges — to accelerate or enhance things that aren’t games. The term ‘Gamification’ itself is a bit controversial. Some critics claim the the term implies that employees are playing games at work and that is not the image that executives want for their companies. For me, I don’t care what anyone calls the premise. What I care about is finding fun and engaging ways to motivate people to complete certain tasks or processes that they normally wouldn’t.
Is having some fun at work a bad thing? I don’t think so! As a matter of fact, I would be comfortable saying that since incentives, in one form or another, drive the majority of the workforce, only good can come in having some that are not only rewarding, but fun to attain!
I’m driving a project right now to introduce game mechanics to a very cool internal application that, in my opinion, will have an immediate impact on the way people interact and collaborate internally at SAP. I will share more about this project in future posts. In the meantime, I’m dying to know what everyone thinks of Gamification as a way to enhance business. I can’t wait to hear your thoughts!!
I’ll check back to reply to comments soon. In the meantime, excuse me as I continue my journey into the Great Unknown!
Actually the problem with gamification is that SAP has been focusing on "edge" scenarios instead of gamification that impacts core business processes such as "Lead to Cash". If you think about it variable compensation for sales or sales incentive contests are games in the truest forms with measurable ROI. I much rather see SAP try to show how to integrate gamification into core processes rather than fringe cases such as let's see how we can make entering PO documents more fun.
Then again I personally feel that SAP right now is ignoring the core and has way too much focus on edge processes instead.
Take care,
Stephen
Let's keep us updated from the journey John.
I hope you're going to release soon some kind of Gamification framework for ABAP maybe via CodeExchange. It would be an enabler to involve the community not only as users but as developers.
It should not so complex but building ABAP classes, tables or maybe BRFplus rules to manage points, achievements, badges and so on so forth makes me a bit nervous.
A good starting point we'll let many people jump onto this hot topic, I think.
Any hint about the underline technology you're considering? (e.g. ABAP/NGAP, J2EE, SAP NW Cloud, BRFplus, ...).
sergio
I think that indeed, a lot of people interested in gamification and SAP, have been thinking about creating a framework, using BRF+/BRM, Social API (share achievements), REST service and Excelsius (for interactive leaderboards) already.
But as far as published results go, it still remains in the thinking stage.
(Guilty as well. I have all the tools at hand, but haven't gotten around to actually creating something)
But I think SAP is brewing something themselves too (Mario Herger )
Looking forward to hear any news Tom
Oh, you can wait for a long time I'm afraid 🙂
I love the topic, but I really don't have the time to actually setup something and try something out. So for now, it'll stay in the brainstorming stage.
It's promising though, to see how many different people are thinking in the same direction. Sooner or later SAP will pick this up as well and may come up with a tool.
Hi John,
I'm a big fan of the gamification idea and I would like to see some examples in the SAP world. And I agree with Stephen that it would be nice when SAP would add gamification to the core processes. Personally I'm working on some non-SAP mobile apps and there gamification is perfect to encourage the user to use the app functionalities. Unfortunately I do not know a framework for that purpose and I need to develop everything from scratch. Even on iOS it's not allowed to use Game Center for non-games, although it would be the perfect service for gamification tasks in a business app.
So I'm looking forward to see your project.
Regards
Björn
Cool, just last week I wrote down my thoughts about gamification for enterprise applications in a post at http://wp.me/p1Eq2T-2t.
The challenge is to find the right usage of gamification mechanics for the intended audience. This is tightly connected to the business objectives you'd like to achieve by using gamification.
Another topic is whether you'd like to go for a stand-alone gamification solution (each business process has its own gamification implementation) or for an enterprise wide approach.
Cheers
Thomas