I have been thinking a lot lately about gamification and how it will change the way we will work with the facebook generation  (to simplify and generalise a bit). I have also been observing and looking at our teenagers commitment to online games like World of Warcraft and how they excel for hours in Virtual Team Leadership with people they never seen, allocating points and duties, solving conflicts I have tried to understand how to leverage this same engagement to something with true business value, beyond managing drones in real battle on the other side of the planet, running ad hoc public command centres using new GUI for big data explosion to be in the loop to traffic management or other national disasters etc ..

There is a combination of shifts going on relevant for CxOs, HCM/HR and CIOs

1- Identity Access Management

Companies need to comply with stuff like the EU Data Integrity directives, to eliminate people dependency, enforce a role driven authority in increasingly complex systems in operation as well as in testing to access data and content. Managing access to data today is messy, close to illegal, likely using production data in testing etc.  and it’s a night mare for risk and security officers. Key word here is that IAM needs a role based access owned by CIO and Risk.

2- Talent Management

Let’s assume bigger companies has integrated unfied HR systems in place knowing how many people are employeed, what they are capable of, if they actually are at work or somewhere else, what there performance history is. In reality many companies does not even have this nor any operational HR dB/ datawarehouse to analyse and make tactical decisions upon. Don’t believe me? Ask them.  But on top of this HR represents the ownership to implement some kind of solution to Talent Management, which, to be useful as an operational system needs to be role based, assessing have vs needed skills/capabilities on individual level and experience for generic skills, strategic skills, specific skills, technical skills => comparable roles in an increasingly global service market. Again, key word here is role bases assessment and this should be jointly owned in the overlap of HR-HCM-COO-CEO. 

3- Gamification

All modern games are today roled based, even if you create your avatar, agree on team set up and armory in WoW etc. Anyway, I have stumbled up on several blogs recently and trendspotters around gamification and it should be taken seriosuly.Best support around products today comes from the pro-bon user network. Adding a gaming layer around their free support you, as a product company, could easily understand that your most valuable employees does not get any payment from you. They solve issues virtual for you around the world. get points and credit and live your product. You are interested to have them in the tribe and even proactively pay them?

Example on gamification in Call Centres: http://abhishekmittal.com/2012/03/07/gamification-the-key-to-reducing-burnout-in-call-centers/

No real owner here, but I believe there is an expectation from the workforce pipeline to have something like this.

Conclusion

We are moving towards a role based ad hoc employment environment, many times project based. You man your projects (football team, movie productions etc) combining roles.  We need a common language for our professional avatars. We need new ways to stimulate and make track records visible. Workplace transformation does not happen as fast as it should. Maybe Integrity Directives could be a compliance compelling trigger to get going. Maybe CIOs need to tell HR how to design their systems and structure to enable a more role based view in the increasingly IT driven company? No wonder IBM acquired Kenexa last week …

What do you think?