Honestly before todays keynote, I had never really spent time thinking about Gamification and how it could be leveraged in the enterprise. So todays keynote, was pretty insightful, and to SAP’s credit their conferences most of the time seem to drive our thought process to areas that we hadn't spent much time thinking about. Gamification is one such area.

We are still in the very early days of Gamification or GAME IT and its going to change a lot before it gets the kind of adoption levels that were suggested during the Keynote - 70% of global 2000 companies will have leveraged Gamification by 2016.

But the underlying principals / concepts seem very relevant to today’s organizations. The organizational model has changed, In the current world Information + Engagement + Creativity + Collaboration are most important for organizations. But getting it is becoming more and more difficult for a variety of reasons like distributed organizations, multi cultural workforce, significant pressure, increased work loads etc.

Game IT might be able to address, some of these challenges. But one area that I felt that was covered sufficiently during the keynote today, but I would be interested in reading about is how GAME IT/ Gamification can help shape the culture of an organization. I believe that will be the killer app for Gamification.

Infact I think an immediate use case for gamification is how to make “Weekly Status Calls” more interesting. I think those calls have become an exercise of monotony, need to think of some ways of bringing Game IT into the mix there. Welcome any inputs. Below are some of the highlights of from the Gamification Keynote:

• Keynote by Jane McGonigal (@avantgame)
• Gaming (Gambling) is not Gamification
• Interesting stat it took - 100 Million hours to create the whole of Wikipedia, currently people invest 3 billion hours a week playing online games, If we get them to take some of this time and invest it in doing something useful but in a gaming model – Imagine the value that can be created.
• 10 Positive emotions created by games
  • Joy
  • Relief
  • Love
  • Surprise
  • Pride
  • Curiosity
  • Excitement
  • Awe and wonder
  • Contentment
  • Creativity
• Gamification or GAME IT – Focuses on the question of How do we bring these 10 emotions to the work place,to innovation challenges & to customer relationships.
• Gamification or Game IT defined - Inventing new work and business practices that engage employees, customers and consumers as effectively as a good game.
• Games can make us more creative, ambitious etc., its important to see to put these into place to help us solve business challenges.
• Case Study - Zappos – Face Game, Objective - More collaboration across departments.
• Some interesting stats:
• Gamification is on the move - 20+ Million $ in Gamification startups in last 12 months.
• Its expected that by 2016 there will be a 2.8 Billion$ spend in Gamification
• 2014 A primary Gamification platform will become as important as Facebook, eBay or Amazon. Gamification core focus is innovation.
• 70% of global 2000 companies will have leveraged Gamification by 2016
• 99% boys / 94% girls play games regularly
• 2015 More than 50%of organization that manage innovation processes will gamify them.
• What is a game? -  Games are unnecessary obstacles we volunteer to tackle.
• Trivia/Thoughts/Comments:
  • Its inevitable soon we will all be gamers.
  • Massively multiplayer thumb wrestling – Played at Teched with all participants.
  • Gamer addiction was written about 3000 years ago.
  • 500 hours before the game starts becoming fun.
  • The opposite of play isn't work – its depression.
  • Eustress – Positive stress.
• Work is more fun than fun- Gamification helps realize that.
• The objective of Gamification is to create Super empowered hopeful individuals

Prashanth Rai

(image credit – dcclark)

Most discussions that I have had/read about is about how the increasing costs at offshore/low cost locations and the forced increase of onsite presence for these companies due to visa issues is going to eliminate / diminish the cost arbitrage advantage that these providers have traditionally had. But here is an interesting prediction by the Everest Group.

We expect increased wage inflation in the low-cost destination countries, and increased fourfold pressures as currencies of developing countries increase relative to their nation currencies of the Euro and Dollar. Nevertheless, we still expect it will become cheaper for providers such as Infosys, Wipro, TCS and others in that class, to provide work out of their low-cost destination locations relative to the cost of delivering them onshore. This is not to say we expect pricing drops from these firms; indeed, they will likely be vocal in pointing to their rising costs as a strong rationale for pricing increases. This arbitrage increase will apply to the overall cost of delivering the work, and may be misunderstood at an individual person or job class level. The reason for this surprising and counter-intuitive prediction is that we believe the class of providers that has mastered talent factories will be able to apply lean process improvements, and continue down-shifting their work to more junior and cheaper resources, overall widening an already growing arbitrage gap. This downshifting of work, which has been under way for a number of years, will be accomplished without materially affecting the quality of the services delivered.

Offshore providers are probably looking at various ways to make this prediction come true, but its not going to be easy. To make this a reality I think a big factor would be the use of tools / prebuilt solutions / use of products / platforms / solutions, the whole version 3.0 of the IT Services industry.

Prashanth Rai

This year at Sapphire we have ring side seats to some really interesting innovations that are happening in the “Enterprise software” space. Over the last couple of days I have seen some really interesting solutions , technologies and products.

To SAP’s credit they have now put a lot of innovation out there, specifically around mobility , business analytics solutions. SAP has accomplished some really neat things and I am sure there are more announcements to come in the key note tomorrow. And this is not factoring in some of the projects that they have in the “works” that are very interesting too, like “SAP River” etc.

But I think they now have two key challenges :

• Communicating it clearly to the customer – In an simple way
• Enabling customers to consume these innovations with truly transformative results

This part of the journey is going to be a lot harder (not trivializing the effort so far) , but this is where the rubber hits the road and is the real test of these solutions.

And if some of these “innovations” are as disruptive as expected by SAP, how customers go about consuming this will also need to be fundamentally different. Yes SAP talks about the stable core and innovations on top. If some of these technologies and solutions are to have the real impact then customers will need to re-invent their IT organizations and their approach to these solutions / projects.

This is a hard problem, Today I listened to many customer stories – Disney, Coca Cola, Bank of America, Under Armor, Canadian Rail and so on and I think in each of the stories the topic moved away from the product or solution to the “implementation” related challenges really fast. How is SAP going to enable this?

Also all this new solutions and innovations , its important that there be a clearly defined roadmap / path to these technologies and this path shouldn’t just be linear, it should prepare for or more accurately focus on leap frogging. How can customer leap frog from where they are to the latest and greatest? I believe that in some way the “Cloud” component will be an important part of this leap frogging approach.

Prashanth Rai

Arriving at the mobility architecture/approach for the organization is going to be a key initiative for CIOs in 2011-2012. It could be an opportunity for a CIO to truly be the Chief Innovation Officer of the enterprise leveraging mobility to innovate his/her business/organization. But its not going to be an easy journey.

This slide from a recent Gartner presentation is a good depiction of the different aspects that CIOs will need to wrap their heads around before arriving at their mobility strategy for the enterprise.

Mobility is fast becoming a key dimension of discussion in any IT project. It has come in from left field in the last year or two and is now becoming an central tenant of most IT projects. A good example of this is Last month was I talking to a customer who had a failed implementation of CRM, and one of the points of failure or lack of usage of the solution they implemented was their poor or non-existent support for mobility.

Some interesting data on this topic from Forrester:

• Mobility is front and center for 62% of CIOs and IT leaders across the globe, with 16% seeing it as a critical priority and 46% seeing it as a high priority.
• Forty-eight percent of organizations interviewed by Forrester across the globe will be spending on mobilizing enterprise applications in 2010. Another 37% show an interest with no plans to implement in 2010.
• Around 75% of organizations deploy mobile applications to increase worker productivity, and 65% to increase employee responsiveness. Forty-eight percent are focused on resolving customer and internal issues faster. Overall improved customer satisfaction is an important driver of mobilizing applications for 42% of firms.
• Thirty-eight percent of companies surveyed are developing their mobile applications in-house, 27% are buying them from an application store, and 25% are having external IT services firms develop custom applications for their mobile requirements. Only 22% are using a mobile extension from an existing packaged application

Mobility in the RIM world was restricted largely to email & calendaring but in the Apple age, everything is mobile. I think the biggest disconnect GEN Y workers are going to have with corporate IT is probably going to be support (or the lack of it) of mobility.

The mobile device has become the primary portal to the electronic world today. And this has become possible by the improved capabilities of smart phones and tablet devices and the growing ecosystem of applications that are created on these platforms."...There is an app for that" has become common vocabulary and all apps aren’t just limited to some trivial functionalities there are a lot of useful capabilities becoming available through these apps that are very relevant and useful to the business user.

“What is mobility” – That seems to be a moving target too. Until 2010, it was only smart phones, now we are talking tablets, who knows what’s next?

The proliferation of smart phones and tablets has been phenomenal. A good indicator for this is that Apple has managed to sell a significant number of iPad2s in just the first month of release. The rate of their adoption in the enterprises is also on the up. Smartphone usage was always high in the corporate world but limited to middle management and above and was restricted primarily to RIM. But today, the proliferation is near complete across the whole organization and it's heterogeneous in terms of platforms – you have IOS, Android, Windows 7, Web OS etc.

CIOs need to take the challenge head-on and leverage this opportunity to innovate.

Prashanth Rai