Gamification brings elements of traditional game play to drive engagement and behavior. Traditionally, engagement of stakeholders has been critical to the success of innovation and enterprise architecture initiatives.
Game players typically exhibit persistence, risk taking, attention to detail and problem solving. All behaviors that would ideally be suited to management of EA and IM.
Many EA projects fail through disengagement of the wider community. Innovation efforts can suffer from a lack of persistence in taking a qualified idea through to delivery. Gamification can help by providing mechanisms to engage and retain communities through these endeavors.
Gamification Detail & Techniques
There are really 4 objectives that we’re looking to address with gamification:
- Fostering engagement
- Inspiring loyalty
- Increasing conversions
- Building a community
The objectives help us to make our innovation management and enterprise architecture practices a success.
Fostering Engagement
We want to engage as many stakeholders as possible and we want them to add value to our programs. We can encourage various behaviors whereby stakeholders want to return and contribute. We can also provide key performance indicators that demonstrate the success of our engagement strategy. Examples of behaviors that foster engagement:
| Behavior | KPI |
| Posting a comment | Number of comments |
| Writing a blog post | Number of blog posts |
| Reading existing content | Number of page views |
| Voting on content | Number of votes |
| Rating content | Number of ratings entered |
Inspiring Loyalty
When we want to encourage users to use a feature, we can encourage various behaviors to inspire them to use the platform more often. We can also inspire loyalty around themes such as innovation management campaigns. Example behaviors that inspire loyalty:
| Behavior | KPI |
| Acquiring more users | Number of new users |
| Logging in | Number of new login’s |
| Viewing a page | Number of page views |
Increasing Conversions
The big problem with conversions is the catch-22 situation of attracting stakeholders and converting them to reviewers of your EA and IM content. Without collaboration you can’t attract users, and without users you don’t get collaboration. So how do you get people to collaborate time and again? Example behaviors that increase conversions:
| Behavior | KPI |
| Exploring various different EA and IM views | Number of page views of EA and IM views |
| Visiting other users’ content | Number of page views of others’ content |
| Reading comments of the content | Number of page views of comments |
Building Communities
Innovation management and agile enterprise architecture requires the input of a community of stakeholders. But how do you build a community and how does gamification help? The following behaviors all help build a community. Example behaviors that build communities:
| Behavior | KPI |
| Leaving comments | Number of comments |
| Writing reviews | Number of reviews |
| Giving a ‘thumbs up’ or ‘high five’ | Number of ‘thumbs up’ or ‘high fives’ |
| Asking a question | Number of questions asked |
| Answering a question | Number of questions answered |
| Sharing an idea | Number of ideas shared |
Gamification Missions & Challenges
Missions and challenges are synonyms in gamification. They require users to perform a prescribed set of game play actions, following a defined route. A mission might involve a single step (for example, entering an idea) or several steps.
Often, the steps in a mission must occur in a certain sequence. These missions are called progression missions. other times, actions can occur in any sequence. These are called random missions.
The tasks in a mission might revolve around the same game play behavior (reading five posts, for example), or could involve different game play behaviors (for example, viewing a diagram, commenting on a diagram, adding a concept to a diagram and adding your own diagram).
When these techniques are used within a platform, an organization can design their own missions and objectives that satisfy their particular business goals (for example, a mission to ensure that stakeholders respond to a campaign in innovation management).
Gamification can be visualized in a number of ways. These include leader boards, badges and enhanced profiles for users within a community.
Badge Themes
There are various elements of gaming that we can harness for enterprise architecture and innovation management purposes. Some example badges and rewards:
| Cascading information: Unlock information continuously | Investment: Feel pride in your work in the program |
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Bonuses – receive unexpected rewards |   |
Achievements – earn public recognition for completing work |
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Countdown – tackle challenges in a fixed amount of time |   |
Appointments – check in to receive new challenges |
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Discovery – navigate through learning and unpick areas of knowledge |   |
Collaboration – work with others to achieve goals |
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Loss aversion – play to avoid losing what you have gained |   |
Epic meaning – work to achieve something sublime or transcendent |
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Infinite play – play continuously until you become an expert |   |
Virality – be incentivized to involve others |
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Synthesis – work on challenges that require multiple skills to solve | ||
| Progression: Success can be visualized incrementally |
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Levels – ramp up and unlock content |   |
Points – increase the running numerical value of your work |
Thus we can see that many of the elements in gamification can be tied directly to some of the pain points that are experienced in enterprise architecture and innovation programs.
Summary
Although, it may seem like gamification requires you to have an interactive way for your stakeholders to participate, there are more convenient ways you can use this strategy and apply it to your innovation management and enterprise architecture as a very powerful tool.
Many organizations might use this in a manner such as having online tooling that offers badges and points, but without tooling you can also benefit from this in different ways.
Make sure you always have your campaigns or architecture KPIs updated and share them on social media. Most companies opt for sharing this on internal social media platforms such as Yammer or SharePoint and using gamification on other social media platforms as well.
Remember that you don’t have to use gamification; it depends on your organizations’ culture.