In my last post, I highlighted how SAP has been leading the way in enterprise gamification since 2010. Today, my goal is to share with you examples of how we are using gamification to drive our customer and employee behavior.
As we are still in a very early stage with gamification in the enterprise, regard them as inspiration for your own approaches. After each example there is a link with more detailed information, including screenshots of the applications. Enough said, let’s dive in:
SAP Software
SAP Vampire Hunt is a fun mobile application that allows employees to hunt “energy suckers.” One player can invite to a hunt – let’s say “This Thursday a noon we meet on the 5th floor to go vampire hunting” – and colleagues can sign up and take pictures of old light bulbs, old surge protectors, and other devices that drain energy when not being used with their smart phones and report that to facility. The players earn points through the kilowatt-hours that they saved the company, and learn about energy saving measures while meeting new people.
Read more about SAP Vampire Hunt.
Internal- & external-facing processes/systems/applications
The SAP Community Network is SAP’s professional community, where SAP customers, partners and employees share information, ask and answer questions, and create FAQs for the several hundred topic areas. The interactions reward the more than two million members with points and badges. Collecting points exposes experts and they are ranked in the optic specific leaderboards. Top contributors are also offered to become forum, blog and wiki moderators or even asked to become SAP mentors.
Read more about the SAP Community Network.
Read more about gamified communities.
Training & Education
SAP Roadwarrior is a sales negotiation simulation that supports SAP sales representatives to stay up-to-date with the newest products and services around SAP’s mobile technologies and applications. Because of the dynamic of the mobile market, sales reps struggle with acquiring the latest knowledge. By putting sales reps into a simulated sales negotiation with a fictitious customer and answering questions, the players playfully learn about SAP’s newest technologies and apps, the mobile challenges that customers from a variety of industries face, all while competing in a friendly way with other sales reps. Since end of 2011 this simulation has been played by several hundred SAP sales reps and gotten lots of positive feedback.
Read more about SAP Roadwarrior.
Human Capital Management
What if companies regarded employees with the eyes of venture capitalists? We listen to their pitch, look at their “business model”, and estimate their future? And in return employees look at venture capitalists if they not only invest in us, but also help us connect and with guidance? This is the idea behind the Venture Capital Model of Talent Management, where a hiring manager “invests” in a new employee and helps building up the value of this resource by connecting, training and mentoring him or her. Through a “stock portfolio” that hiring and supervising managers receive on the employee, managers will be evaluated by the value that a new employee adds to the company and how managers increase the value of existing employees. Instead of blocking transfers to other units, saving on training, and “forgetting” promotions, managers will be encouraged and rewarded to take care of the company’s most precious resources: the employees.
Read more about Talent Management.
Marketing & Branding
The mobile application Paul the Octopus (available on the iTunes-store) – named after the famous octopus from Sea Life Center in Germany that predicted with 100% accuracy the outcome of the past soccer world cup games – engages users by asking the to predict which team in the UEFA Champions League will win the upcoming matches. Thanks to the wisdom of the crowd, the prediction of the winning teams may be as accurate as well. Beside that, trivia quizzes and games played against your friends are part of the app as well.
SAP is promoting its product in a subtle way. By having it handle the crowd-generated data and using it to analyze and predict the outcomes. HANA – that’s the name of the product – is an analytical technology, that keeps all the data all the time in memory and allows unprecedented speeds to analyse data and calculate predictions.
Read more about Paul the Octopus.
Event/Workshop/Conference Games
The SAP Knowledge Quest was a scavenger hunt that was played at the SAP TechEd in Las Vegas in 2011. Nearly nine hundred of the more than six thousand attendees formed teams and collected points by visiting booths, finding clues and answering questions and doing all types of silly things for a chance to win some grand prizes and achieving the over all goal of one million points. Reaching this goal meant that SAP donated $20,000 for a charity.
With the help of The Go Game my colleague Julie Barrier planned and organized the scavenger hunt and created a blast amongst the participants.
Read more about SAP Knowledge Quest.
Innovation Games
Overcoming status, cultural, or ideological biases is important in coming to (fact-based) decisions. To avoid having the highest ranking person in the room dominating the decision finding process, or the strive for group harmony influence the prioritization of product features, or letting political ideology purposely ignore facts is what innovation games help to overcome by moving the elephant out of the room. That’s what SAP has been using to improve team work and decision finding processes.
Read more about Innovation Games.
Summary
These were only a handful of examples that SAP has designed, prototyped and built. It has become clear that gamification is not just a ridiculous fad that hopefully will go away soon, but that we have reached the tipping point and that this concept has been broadly embraced at SAP. Colleagues are eagerly learning and applying game design techniques, game mechanics and fun into SAP business software and many aspects that touch SAP. Follow SAP and how SAP is leading the enterprise gamification movement.
If you are interested in more examples and specific challenges of gamification in an enterprise context, make sure to follow these websites: