Things have been a little busy here at GamifyOracle. Last week, I attended a small conference in San Diego on Enterprise Gamification. Mario Herger of SAP, Matt Landes of Google and I were on a panel discussion about how to introduce and advocate gamification in your organization. I gave a talk as well as a workshop on gamification. The workshop was a new concept, to take our Design Jam from Applications User Experience and try it with people outside of user experience. I have to say, the whole thing was a great success, in great part because I had some expert help from Teena Singh from Apps UX. We took a flow from expense reporting and created a scenario about sales reps who are on the road a lot and how we needed them to get their expense reports filed by the end of the fiscal year. We divided the attendees into groups and gave them a little over two hours to work out how they might use game mechanics to gamify the flows.
We even took the opportunity to re-use the app our fab dev team in our Mexico Development Center put together to gamify the event including badges, points, prizes and a leaderboard.
Since I am a firm believer that you can't gamify everything (or at least, not everything well), I focused my talk prior to the workshop on when it works, and when it might not, including pitfalls to gamifying badly. I was impressed that the teams all considered what might go wrong with gamifying expenses and built into their designs some protections against that. I can't wait to take this concept on the road again, it really was a fun day.
Now that we have gotten through that set of events, we're wildly working on our next project for next week. I'm doing a focus group at Oracle OpenWorld on Gamification in the Enterprise. To do that, Andrea Cantu and I are trying to kill as many trees as possible while we work out some gamification concepts to present (see proof below!). It should be a great event and I'm hoping we learn a lot about what our customers think about the use of gamification in their companies and in the products they use.
So that's the news so far from GamifyOracle land. I'll try to get more out about those events and more after next week. And if you will be at OOW, ping me and we can discuss in person! I'd love to know what everyone is thinking in the area.
