Gamification will be everywhere soon.
The reason is that gamification (the use of game mechanics such as leaderboards, badges, achievements…etc in non game applications) is deeply social and makes many routine tasks or less enjoyable tasks more fun as it fosters interactions and positive competition with your friends, colleagues & peers.
The open web as well enterprise 2.0 applications get ever more social moving from connecting people to information to connecting people to people (see for example “Stop talking about social”) and gamification will gradually be integrated into every type of interaction, be it personal, private, public or professional.
Gamification is already widely integrated in consumer applications (for an overview of gamification concepts and some examples see my presentation on slideshare ) but now also starts to be more & more integrated in enterprise applications.
An interesting & important move here is the recent acquisition of Ripple, a social human capital management application by Salesforce, the leading enterprise cloud application vendor.
What Ripple does is that it replaces top down employee performance management (that never really worked well) by peer-to-peer social performance management. Employees assign themselves goals they’d like to achieve and then ask their colleagues to engage in helping them to achieve their goals. Do you see the power of social & gamification here ?
Other examples of gamified enterprise applications are Play Nicely, a social gamified coding & bug tracking application or Google’s internal travel expense management system (see slide 14 of the above mentioned presentation).
Enterprise 2.0 and social Intranets (Twitter like microblogging, group collaboration, Facebook like directories, social bookmarking, activity streams..etc) are still in their early adoption phase amongst companies but with a high growth rate and every analyst I read out there agrees that any company or organization will be social in the near future if it wants to survive on the marketplace. Social Intranets have an enormous power of unleashing collective intelligence, creating true learning organizations and fostering constant open innovation and creating more people-centric companies and organizations.
They also make them more attractive to highly skilled talents as the quality of the digital workplace is already becoming a criteria in employer choice for these people (they simply want to use the communication power they already heavily use in their private life also at their workplaces).
But social Intranets also imply flattening hierarchies and empowering every employee which depending on the historical culture of the organization will be a more or less difficult exercise for it’s leaders and managers.
The social revolution thus continues to profoundly transform the workplace as well customer & partner relations to many respects.
