When was the last time that you heard a "Thank you" from your co-workers? A "good job" from your manager? If you need hard thinking to remember such an incident, or if it was even just a few days ago then, frankly speaking, you are screwed.
Why do you get no feedback or when, then always late? Because that's our systems are built. At the beginning of the 21st century we operate in a motivational environment from the beginning of the 1900. At work, in school, and most other environments.

The majority of us live in societies that encourage individuals to take initiative and build businesses, with the notion that if you do good work, you will be rewarded. The better you do a job, the higher your salary, your bonus, your status. We all know that this is bullshit. The way how people are promoted in corporations is partial, and certainly not depending on the good job that they did. The better you network, socialize, kiss your way up (and in the German language we have a term named "Mastdarmakrobatik", which literally translate to "intestine-acrobatics" - sorry, this mental image will be stuck forever in your head), the more likely you will be harvesting the fruits and climb the career-ladder.

What do you do when your customers are interacting only once a month with your site, but you still want to engage them?

That's the dilemma faced by OPower and WaterSmart, two companies trying to help households reduce your energy and water consumption. The water and energy bills that households can access from the utilities are available in monthly or bi-monthly intervals. And that's the only time when users come to the website – not many chances for OPower and SmartWater when they want households to change their behavior and give them feedback. Even with Smartmeter-technologies being now installed in many regions, there is still no timelier way to display energy consumption on a daily base or even by appliance, and a potential feedback about the effects that a user's actions may have had.

Most gamification challenges that we talked about so far were either about applications with which users interacted at least once a week (like time-recording), or up to multiple times a day (Email, customer support system, development tools, sales tools). In those applications and systems it's relatively simple to use a diversity of feedback elements and incentives and assume the user's awareness of what effect caused what feedback is there. One of the gamification rules to follow is to give feedback as immediate as possible. Feedback five months later is not helping the player to react in time and learn fast enough. The player may have even forgotten about the precise details of his/her actions.

In my upcoming book Enterprise Gamification will be a chapter included on gamification platforms, technologies and services (including game studios). For the 400-page book, which will be available in Q4/2012 both in print and as e-book, vendors and providers will have an opportunity to give an overview of their offerings, including examples and screenshots. The platforms, technologies and services should be relevant for gamification in organizations (with that I understand gamification that is directed towards employees, employees from partner organizations and professional communites, as well as the occasional customer-focus).

If you have enterprise-relevant gamification examples, provide them in a separate document, including description, screenshots, etc. and foremost also some before and after gamification facts.

This way readers - who will be CIOs, UX-designers, developers, community managers, application developers, IT consultants, game designers, marketing&brand manager, business process experts,... - will get an overview of vendors and approaches that can help that in their gamification efforts.

Attachments:

File	Description	File size
Platform.doc	Book: Enterprise Gamification - Template for platforms, technologies and services, including use cases and game studios	83 Kb

Many large enterprises are starting to look at gamification as a powerful strategy to drive engagement across their internal and external programs. SAP, one of the earliest of these companies, has been investigating Gamification with the launch of a company-internal gamification community since the summer of 2010.

While there had been individual approaches before that, we never went beyond research or experienced more in terms of recognition. In 2010 when we started experimenting with gamification techniques, search engines returned approximately 400-500 search results for the term “gamification.” In all honesty, we were not even sure, if gamification is the term or strategy that we were looking for.

Fast forward 2012: the same search engines return several million results for gamification and my community surpassed 500 members, and so has our company’s interest. The topic has taken off – big time!