Contributor: Christian Weichelt
This year’s Gartner EA Summit in London offered a really fresh view on innovation in the EA environment. It’s about a new trend which brings game thinking and game mechanics like challenges, rewards, and levels to other environments of interaction. This trend is called gamification. Gabe Zichermann showed impressively what effect gamification can have on interaction design and on the results. While this looks like something really relevant for the Web 2.0 world and digital natives, one might ask: What does this have to do with Enterprise Architecture?
One possible answer might be: a lot. What if gamification could be used to improve EA content development? Since EA moves beyond the ivory tower of a handful of experts and there will be more contributors throughout the organization the big question for EA initiatives will be: How do I motivate people to contribute? How do I make sure that they have the right skills for their level of contribution and how do I reward them? It is about the engagement of people and their progression to mastery. And although it is still some way down the road until these concepts will materialize in EA products, the foundation can already be laid today and is important to do so.
As I understand this, there are a couple of ingredients that are prerequisites to allow the application of game mechanics to EA initiatives and the tools used. First of all it is about having enough ‘players’ to contribute to the game – as mentioned before. This is about collaboration and how people jointly see the results of their work, which is the feedback aspect of it. Secondly, depending on the roles of the contributors it is necessary to have dedicated levels for the various skill sets and tasks – to not scare or bore people. Additionally, challenges can either been solved solely or jointly, e.g. through a workflow that connects the tasks of the ‘players’. With the right EA environment everything’s there to let the games begin … so let’s see what the high score table could look like.
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