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!
While I – with a development background – started the SAP–internal community with the goal in mind to learn new tricks in improving the user experience of SAP software, it turned out that colleagues from at least seven areas showed interest in gamification as well. These were colleagues from:
- SAP Software / User Experience
- Internal- & external-facing processes/systems/applications
- Training & Education
- Human Capital Management
- Marketing & Branding
- Event/Workshop/Conference Games
- Innovation Games
While that may not be the most comprehensive or scientific categorization (with overlapping categories), that is what I have been using to cluster gamification topics. In addition the motivations for my colleagues was diverse as well. Engaging users, improving data quality, creating more buzz, increase adoption, make training material stickier, reduce admin-workload, increase revenue, and many more reasons were named. In the end it’s not so easy to put the reason for looking at gamification in a big corporation like SAP into one catchy phrase.
During the past 2 years I was able to host multiple gamification events with participants from SAP’s customers, partners and employees, supported by Badgeville (Gamification Cups in Palo Alto, Israel, Shanghai and Las Vegas). As a result of these events and my talks with many SAP teams around the world, I collected a list of over 100 enterprise gamification examples that SAP has come upt with. Sure, many of them are nothing else then concepts and ideas, but more than half of them surpassed the UI mockup stage to become prototypes and a surprising number turned into products (either used SAP internally or even externally).
In my next post, I will share for each category one of these examples with you. Stay tuned and be sure to comment if you like this article!