So, one of the things of our customer collaboration is that they are not obligated to work with them. So, I think that the one of the challenge right now in social software is adoption. I mean assuming that the software does what it’s supposed–what it promised and people still need to use it and adopt it before the organization can realize it’s value.
I mean clearly every company have every software–every social software claims certain things. Your productivity will boost, you will like reduce your time to solution and self-cycle and give an element of self-cycle and all that. If the software does everything it does, everything it promised, there’s still one caveat: People still need to use it. If no one use it then–no one likes to use the software then you’re back to square one, you’re back to zero again then you don’t realize any of the promise that the software give you.
So, I think the same thing is with external collaboration. You have this great platform if the social customers out there are not collaborating, not willing to collaborate with you then you’re out of luck. So, one of the ways that we can try collaboration with customer externally is through–we’ve seen that over and over again, platform is through gamification.
So, gamification is essentially the use of game mechanics and game dynamics to drive a game-like engagement in behavior and when people play games, they’re very engaged, they pay attention, they have a lot of fun and they continue to play, so these are the kind of game-like engagement and behavior that we want to drive, so we want to drive them to continue to engage and collaborate with a company. So, I think gamification will be a huge part of a lot of company’s initiative if they are interested in collaborating with an external customer.
I think this actually works internally, too, because if you can drive people to adopt a software then assuming that the software works then you’d realize the value and then people will start using it once they’ve realized the value of it. The trouble is that I note is that steep learning curve at the beginning and many people actually have a hard time overcoming that steep learning curve like move on to the area where they start to realize value.
I agree Michael.
What if a business structured it’s social learning and collaborative work activities like games? Would this be an effective way to onboard and engage people and get value out of connections and communications between employees and customers?
One model I can think of is Open Ideo. Any others?
Hello Blair,
Than you for commenting on my interview.
One can always structure a business structure or other organizational structure like a game. The trouble there is that most organization or institutions won’t because it threatens their positions in the company. I’m not saying that it is not possible, but it would definitely require a business transformation before one can do that.
Open Ideo is just a very specific application, and it doesn’t require a complete business transformation and restructuring. That is why it can get quite a bit of adoption and buy in. Other more disruptive methods, such as knowledge market, where employee’s salary and positions within the organization depends on these non-traditional metric, would be more difficult.
Feel free to visit my blog on the topic of gamification:
http://lithosphere.lithium.com/t5/Building-Community-the-Platform/bg-p/MikeW/label-name/gamification