When work becomes play: Using Game Mechanics to Drive Digital Transformation

Here's a fabulous blog on Gamification by the effervescent Maggie Buggie our Head of Digital Transformation at Capgemini Consulting.  This is her bag baby.  Hope you enjoy it.

Gamification is a term that has experienced major market hype and to a certain extent has suffered for it.  That said, when you get below the hype there really is a tangible business potential to be harnessed by the application of intelligent, focused gamification interventions.

Gamification is the use of gaming mechanics in a non-gaming environment. The concept uses game thinking to solve problems and engage audiences.  It is regularly oversimplified to a lowest common denominator of “playing games at work” but to do so is to miss the point.  Within an organisation gamification utilises intrinsic human behaviours such as the need for recognition to drive and embed performance change and to augment the enterprise’s innovative capacity.

Against a background of changing consumer behaviours, the perennial challenge of driving ROI with historical technology and the burgeoning employee expectations of their workplace experience, the appetite of executives for innovative mechanisms they can deploy to create a step change in business performance is growing.  It is estimated that over 70% of all transformations fail.  Couple this with research estimates that over 71% of employees are not engaged or are actively disengaged from their work and the prognosis for most business transformations is not good.  Market analysts have indicated gamification based services as one of the next frontiers in the Digital evolution for business.  According to Gartner, “by 2015, 40% of Global organisations will use gamification as the primary mechanism to transform business operations” and Forrester has forecast that the gamification market is expected to be worth $2.5bn by 2015.

Cultural change is a key element of the Digital Transformation agenda. Increasingly our clients, across all sectors, are acknowledging the need to address and drive behavioural change as part of the cultural shift to a digitally enabled, change ready organisation.  People and transformation management intensity are key to unlocking the digital advantage as evidenced by our recent empirical research on Digital Transformation with MIT. http://www.capgemini-consulting.com/the-digital-advantage/

and have successfully unlocked increased business performance through digitally enabled transformation

“How” you approach and deliver digital transformation is as important as “What” you do.  What distinguishes the “digirati” from the rest of the pack is that they exhibit digital maturity.  

2013 will see a wider gap emerging between those who are successfully driving their business through digital and those who are not, and are therefore getting left behind.  Addressing behavioural change through enterprise gamification is a key part of both building enterprise innovation capacity and unlocking the digital advantage.  It’s the beginning of a new game in the Digital revolution.