Although
the basic tenants of Gamification have been around for a while now, but the
faculty started taking shape primarily after social networking explosion. The
same got a huge boost by riding on the smart phones revolution that now made
these games available within 9 feet distance of the player at all times.
And it
wasn't much time before the Enterprises wanted to latch onto the new super kid
on the block to get it's mundane activities done. Enterprises when look at
their internal processes like trainings, motivation, project management,
compliance etc. they've always faced a huge challenge. So, if gamification
could get you new customers, keep them engaged with your brands, follow &
recommend your products so why won't that work with the employees.
And this
is where the last few years in the Enterprise Gamification have been going. But
considering that the Enterprise gamification was just another flavor of the
outward looking gamification was flawed at a few critical fundamentals.
Understanding these is a must for any kind of successful implementation of
Enterprise gamification.
- You have no players to acquire:
The biggest focus of gamification in the social or mobile world is
to acquire new customers. This could be in the form of getting new users,
ensuring that the stay on, invite their friends, talk about you in their social
networks and even probably buy your products. Gamification here focusses on
getting more people and then the processes take over. Most of the great
implementations of gamification do exhibit this.
But when you move into an Enterprise scenario, your user group is
already present in front of you and in most cases captive as well to be on your
systems. Thus the whole idea of getting them onto your systems isn't so
critical. What's more important is how have you thought through the interaction
once your players arrive
- The player MUST play, so Game enablers not Game Wins
In usual gamification scenarios, you might have to keep the players
motivated via challenges or rewards to ensure that the player stays engaged
with the game till the end. On the contrary, in Enterprises there emerge
multiple scenarios where the underlying act is actually mandatory but mundane
or difficult. Here too, gamification can be a great tool but in the sense that
it eases the task of the player by guiding or providing transparency or
collaboration. This is similar to saying that the aim of a soccer game is
scoring goals, but the game elements like score-boards, time keepers etc. go a
long way in assisting the players. So in an Enterprise, many times it’s the
latter that is more critical
- Desired time to be spent
In most of the gamified systems developed, the sponsor would want
the players to play as much for as long and as many times. But this actually
inverts in most of the Enterprise scenarios. Here, the enterprise sponsor's
intent is to get in the player only at the right time, spend the minimum time
required to do the intended task in the most accurate fashion (so that there
are minimum retries) and move out of the system.
The same fact also induces a very different design patters with more
focus on reduced distraction (so possibly minimalistic visuals), quick &
easy getting through the entire act and certainly an impact on budgets
- Diversifying and then converging
Unlike customer facing gamification where the objectives/processes
could be single (or very limited), once an Enterprise treads down the gamified
path, there are multiple internal processes that the same sponsor and the
players (i.e. employees ) share. This raises expectations that the remaining
internal processes be gamified too. This in turn requires that although the
flavor of a particular game be defined by the type of process but still the
collectibles from various systems actually flow together and actually converge
into something quite meaningful. Of course, the employees are used to such a
system where although they all might be into varied kinds of job activities but
ultimately there are procedures in place that finally converge into an enterprise
wide system of hierarchies and remunerations
So
although the basic mechanics of gamification in motivating player actions in a
desired manner, but the actions themselves in a customer facing and enterprise
element are so different that it takes a whole new perspective to handle the
same. Considering the above points could be a good starting point when
designing gamified solutions for Enterprise processes.
