If you’ve been following me on Twitter you’d know I’m excited about gamification. In fact, I even started this blog post about building gamification into S***-**w and what I was going to do to develop such a module (I may even append that original post to the bottom). On the other hand, a colleague today made a comment along the lines of “Gamification? We’ve been doing contests to improve customer service for years.” To be honest, that got me thinking.
I’m annoyed at buzzwords. To be specific, I’m more annoyed at the fact that these buzzwords are coming and going, but there doesn’t seem to be much adoption. Plenty of talk, absolutely, but where’s the change in IT? Think I’m crazy? Let’s look at each of them individually:
Social Media: The father of IT buzzwords in my opinion. For me, it all started with Friendster, followed by Myspace and eventually to the king of it all, Facebook. I also can’t forget about LinkedIn and my three Twitter accounts. With all these social media outlets for a single person, how could any organization not have a thriving social media community? Oh wait, that would be mine… never-mind.
Cloud Computing: The “cloud” reminds me more of the 1958 movie The Blob – there’s no way to really describe such a mass, but it’s moving, growing, and some people are definitely terrified of it. As for me? I’m happily (and slowly) moving more of my personal items to it. Box.net, Dropbox, streaming music/movies, even Microsoft Office products. Technically, I could even say all my email is there (as is probably yours). And the concept is great – someone else worries about all the hardware and resources that goes into delivering a service, and I only need to focus on how best to utilize that service to gain value. It’s a win-win, right? So really, why does it seem like there’s a slow adoption? Maybe it’s hard for IT people to think in terms of services. Maybe change is just hard. I’m not sure of the answer, but I’m still hearing more talk over seeing the action.
Gamification: I grew up playing games, and every once in a while (as my toddler son allows), I get to actually play one. The best games are those played online and against other people. Competition is natural, and when winning, enjoyable. So “gamification” isn’t necessarily a new idea. It’s really more of a new buzzword. Please don’t think I intend to downplay the energy; I’m very excited and I’m looking forward to building gamification into S***-**w (which I think I mentioned). But will this simply pass over IT as well? After all, I’m seeing gamification with such applications as Foursquare, and even with some sites like Slickdeals.net, so mixing natural human psychology into motivation certainly works. But can the enterprise IT world embrace this as well?
I really don’t intend to sound negative with this post. On the contrary, I’m rather optimistic about each of the previously mentioned “buzzwords.” My only complaint is that I want to have each of them stop being buzzwords and for them to move into the general IT lexicon of available “tools of the trade.”
Now – on to my original post (and it isn’t edited and not finished):
Game On!
A few weeks ago the helpdesk manager at my (quasi) new place of work brought up the idea of building some gamification into Service-Now. He even handed me a wonderful article from the brilliant Gartner analyst, Jarod Greene, which went into more detail about gamification in the IT Service Management world (I follow Jarod on Twitter, so he has to be brilliant). A few days later I got a visit from another brilliant fellow who now works at Service-Now (once again, I know he’s brilliant because I follow him on Twitter). I brought up the idea of building gamification into Service-Now and I wanted to know if anyone had done it before. Still being fairly new to Service-Now, and since Service-Now operates in the 21st Century, he didn’t know the answer but was more than happy to post the question on the internal message board. It really did not take long at all (I don’t even think minutes) before the comments started rolling in about the exciting idea. That same day, with the help of a partner who’s working with me on Service-Now (I won’t name specific names – I’ll just say they’re a Partner that helps bring things to Fruition), we began building the actual mechanics of gamification. I don’t want to make this post too much about the theoretical aspects of the game, especially since they’re different for everyone, but I’d rather give more detail as to what I’m going, and if I can generate any feedback, great.
First, we’re going with a badge system (think Foursquare on this one). This means I’d need a table to contain the badge informatio
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