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Will Gamification replace Management?
As a trend among social media, gamification is one of the buzzword. It’s not about video games; it’s about using the power that drives Farmville transformed into business value. In that situation, the term gamification is typically used to describe situations where game play elements are incorporated into non-game situations to solve problems, change behaviour or engage audiences.
So what’s so exciting about gamification? It is not a new idea. Game theory has long been used to explain economic behaviour and is used to explain political and sociological behaviour as well. What is new however, is the application of gaming techniques to everyday tasks and behaviors. Primarily, gamification has been used in consumer settings like Foursquare. To stay with the example of Foursquare, having comparable achievement for certain tasks can work in other areas, from HR, to government, healthcare and even business management, as well. That happened because game play elements can be incorporated into non-game situations to solve problems, change behaviour or engage audiences.
Intranets are the perfect platform to do so. We all know that the SharePoint’s social media features are rarely used and when they are used, the user’s acceptance is more than low. But making use of these features can make a difference regarding the greater information content we can keep in our enterprise.
Why not using the infusion of game mechanics, game design and styles into your SharePoint Portal. The biggest flaw in every Portal is getting people to enter data. There’s no good way to do this why not make a game out of it. Inspire people to add metadata to there documents instead of command it. Give away the “meta data hero award” and display the awards as trophies on the mySite? Sounds trite but I guarantee you’ll see better results than you see now.
Don’t have your focus on SharePoint’s social media features for the sake of being social. Social in the meaning of sharing, has its platform already. It’s called Facebook! Don’t try to copy it; it will not fit into your company’s culture anyway. Gamification instead, can only works in the way of your corporate culture, therefor the acceptance will be much higher! Or am I wrong about this?
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