On April 29th, 2013, Omniquest went to join its buzzword brethren in the technology afterlife.  Originally born on January 24th, 2011, Omniquest came about from the crazy mind of Michael Slabodnick after the helpdesk manager at his local place of employment brought forth a Gartner whitepaper written by Jarod Greene (http://www.gartner.com/id=1839417).  Wanting to show off his newly acquired ServiceNow skills, and basically looking to have fun during work while showing how awesome he is, Michael started working on gamification after succumbing to peer pressure in the ITSM world.  Gamification turned into Omniquest after the work caught the ear of one of the directors and she formed a task force to build the concept of gamification into the existing Service Desk.  The code for Omniquest came about from several team collaboration meetings, late-night coding fueled by unknown chemicals, and the general excitement of people changing the way they work and rebelling against the concept of a dreary Service Desk existence.  During its life, Omniquest awarded hundreds of badges and points to the players, but more importantly, it allowed Michael Slabodnick to present at the Pink 12 and Knowledge 12 conferences, which also made for funny and entertaining blog posts.  Gamification is survived by buzzword siblings cloud computing, big data and social media.

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Started working in IT in 1999 as a support desk analyst as a way to help pay for food during college. Studied Electrical Engineering for two years before realizing biochemistry was more fun than differential equations, and so ultimately graduated with a Biology degree in 2006. Having (reluctantly) failed at getting accepted into dental school, embraced working in IT and has gone broke becoming an ITIL Expert. Likes to jog, sing camp songs, quote Mel Brooks movie lines and make dumb jokes and loves working for an Israeli tech company where December 25th is a regular work day.