Social Media, the BBC and Jon Jacob (@thoroughlygood at #digitalsurrey)

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 14 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Last month I travelled down to Farnham to see Michael Wu’s talk on the Science of Gamification at Digital Surrey. Despite a hellish journey home*, I enjoyed the evening and met some great people, so I decided to come back again last night for this month’s talk. I may feel like an interloper from “analogue North Bucks” – and it would be fair to ask why I’m at an event for networking amongst the Surrey digerati – but my first two experiences of Digital Surrey have been great, so it looks like I could become a regular, if they’ll have me!

Last night’s talk was from Jon Jacob (@thoroughlygood), a BBC writer, journalist and producer – who was at pains to point out he was speaking on behalf of himself, and not the BBC. Actually, Jon has a post about his own performance, which is worth a read.

I took a lot of notes in his talk, which included his reading test on LBC whilst being constantly heckled by Sandi Toksvig, but I think it was best summarised with these points:

  • Jon has used and shamelessly exploited social media to build a “brand” and pursue a career.
  • Social media is at risk of being taken over by dangerous forces who don’t understand it. Many of us like using it, or tolerate it, but more and more people are using social media, including groups that don’t “get it”. Early adopters need to keep an eye out for:
    • Protest-driven people who know technology, bring together armies of geeks and put together massive project management teams to deliver projects in time and budget.
    • People with a little bit of information – they learn how to use Twitter on a Tuesday afternoon and set up as “social media experts” on Wednesday.
  • Social media is a conversation to tap into for stories and sources. More fundamentally it’s a transaction between the author and their own audience. If we post something on Facebook, implicitly we want attention: if we deny it we’re liars! It’s the same for Twitter – about the actor and the audience – not about how large is the audience…
  • If we listen to a radio programme and don’t like then we won’t listen again… it’s the same for TV… if it’s a bit tired we’ll go elsewhere. If that’s how it works for radio and TV, surely it must be the same for social media?
  • It doesn’t matter how many followers you have, the focus is about copy/editorial, not the medium.
  • The secret to engaging copy is that the personality flows through. Be the same person on the medium and in person. Tap into joy rather than avoid it. Exploit everything about yourself in a good way and turn into something (on a personal level or a corporate level).
  • Social media is nothing more than a distribution method, just as TV and radio are.
  • The thing that excites Jon is coming up with ideas and doing things. Maybe people have ideas and feel a bit frightened. Maybe they have ideas and “marketing” didn’t like something. Clearly there are certain laws to follow but it’s actually quite difficult to be that naughty. It’s hard to bring down governments!
  • We need to tap into people with ideas. Don’t just ask them to write a blog post but inspire them, create a delicate ecosystem, get people enthused. That can’t be bottled or put in a book but we’re missing a trick if we’re selling something and have teams of copywriters – maybe we need to do break out of our boundaries and do something different.

By the way, I found Jon’s talk to be completely engaging (thoroughly good, one might say). I saw some negative comments and sure, maybe he went off in a few seemingly random directions, but at all times I was completely switched on to what he was saying. There’s not too many presentations where I can say that!

*OK, so “hellish” is a slight exaggeration but the Highways Agency did close 5 out of the 6 lanes on the M1 northbound where the M25 filters in, at around 10pm, to lean a ladder up against an overhead gantry. I’m sure the resulting queues were just for their own amusement.

Humanising the customer experience (and why there are not enough Ts in alphabet spaghetti)

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 14 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Every now and again, a story comes along that just makes you feel good. And it makes you realise just how important it is for employees to understand their personal impact on a customer experience.

I saw a tweet earlier this week which highlighting a couple of letters, one written to Sainsburys by a three year old (with a tiny bit of help) and the other, a response from their Careline. It would have been so easy for Sainsburys to ignore this, or just to respond in a “standard” letter but instead, they wrote in a style that was clearly aimed at “Lily”, signing off with their age, and enclosing a token gift. Very sweet.

And now there’s even imitation from nearly-31-year-old Managing Directors of PR agencies who don’t think there are enough Ts in cans of alphabet spaghetti for them to write their press releases. Oh how true that seems at times!

This sort of reaction is not new – but it is heart-warming, and great to see in today’s society of bland corporate identities.  (The positive press it’s generated won’t have done them any harm either!)

I’m sure, if I look hard enough, I can find a letter from the Institute of Advanced Motorists, congratulating me, aged 7 and a-quarter, on my entry in their road sign recognition competition at the Northampton Town Show (which was only beaten on the last day) and enclosing a book token. I still remember that today – and it makes me smile when my own son (who is approaching that age) asks about road signs on our journeys…

Can we measure online influence? And should we even try?

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 14 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

One of the challenges with managing corporate a social media presence is understanding the impact that you’re making. It’s notoriously difficult because there is no “one true way”. Indeed, if there was a simple way to assess online influence, I’d say that its inventor could clean up.

What we do have though is a number of indices – and two of the most common are:

  • Klout “the standard for influence”.
  • PeerIndex “understand your social capital”.

OK, so we have algorithms to generate a number, but I’m not convinced they are really measuring influence. Klout in particular seems to be swayed by volumes of online activity– I went on holiday for a week and tweeted less often, then my Klout score fell – no surprises there then; but did I really become less influential because I dropped out for a week?

Earlier this week, I wrote a post calling for “brands” to engage and not to simply use social media as a marketing tool to broadcast their own message (or positive customer feedback).  But there is another side to the story – what if you are a brand?  How do you target your limited resources effectively? How do you assess the influence of a social media renegade and decide whether they warrant a response or not?

I’m not sure that we should be trying to. Does it really matter whether a disgruntled customer is influential or not? If they are disgruntled, then they deserve help – even if that help is simply pointing them in the direction of the appropriate channel to get an appropriate resolution.  It’s interesting though to see where influence engines meay head in future (and, indeed, how they might be monetised).

At a recent Digital Surrey event, I was chatting with Simon Cast, Head of Product at PeerIndex. He sees a time when systems such as his will become integrated with customer relationship management (CRM) systems (like Salesforce.com). For a business, that’s valuable – when I call their customer services team, not only can they see details of my transactions with them, but they can also see if I’m influential in a broader sense (i.e. could I damage them if they don’t fulfil my request?).  And, not only will they see if I’m influential in general terms, but if I’m influential on a specific topic. A car manufacturer might not be too bothered if I’m influential in the world of telecommunications, but what if I could potentially affect people’s car purchase decisions?

I guess an analogy to the social capital-CRM tie up is a credit score. My credit score not only affects the financial services products that are available to me (and how much they cost) but it (along with other metrics) might be used to tell my bank how valuable a customer I am, and may influence the way that they interact with me (e.g. sending my call to a UK-based call centre instead of an offshore one). Online influence is a logical equivalent for customer service organisations, but it sounds like a risky strategy to me.

Just to recap on my earlier statement:

“[…] I know only too well the challenges of monitoring and measuring social media activity; the resources that are required; and I completely understand that it’s not always possible to respond to every mention of your company’s products and services.

Even so, I’ve heard of organisations that consider whether to respond based on the apparent influence of the user. That sounds dangerous to me – someone may only have a limited online audience (for example, a handful of followers on Twitter) but their influence could be much wider. Perhaps a journalist/analyst has a personal and a professional Twitter account (or a blog), one with just a few followers, the other much more influential? Maybe the aggrieved/frustrated consumer is also a CIO, or a stakeholder in the business services purchasing process?

We’re all consumers, but many of us have responsibility for business purchases too – and it’s unrealistic to expect that poor experiences as a consumer won’t prejudice business decisions […]”

So can we really measure influence? Maybe we’re getting closer, but I don’t think we’re there yet. And should we even be trying to? There might be some benefits, but beware of the risks too…

Social media: don’t forget the social (it’s time to engage)

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 14 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Many readers of my blog will know that I’m a heavy Twitter user. I’m also very un-British when it comes to complaining about poor service and, for those organisations with Twitter accounts, I do have a tendency to copy them in on my frustrations.

One thing I find very interesting is the variety of reactions that I receive. As part of my job involves helping to develop the social media strategy for a major IT systems and services company, I know only too well the challenges of monitoring and measuring social media activity; the resources that are required; and I completely understand that it’s not always possible to respond to every mention of your company’s products and services.

Even so, I’ve heard of organisations that consider whether to respond based on the apparent influence of the user. That sounds dangerous to me – someone may only have a limited online audience (for example, a handful of followers on Twitter) but their influence could be much wider. Perhaps a journalist/analyst has a personal and a professional Twitter account (or a blog), one with just a few followers, the other much more influential? Maybe the aggrieved/frustrated consumer is also a CIO, or a stakeholder in the business services purchasing process?

We’re all consumers, but many of us have responsibility for business purchases too – and it’s unrealistic to expect that poor experiences as a consumer won’t prejudice business decisions, so I’d like to call out some good, and some less good, reactions to online interaction:

  • First up, Dell. The company has been used as a case study in just about every social media training course since Jeff Jarvis’ “Dell Hell”. The story goes that they took Jeff’s comments and acted, before implementing a much broader social media strategy – one which now acts as a major revenue stream too. My personal experience was that, after blogging about a difficult purchase, Dell contacted me and gave me the technical pre-sales advice that I needed, and shipped the cables that I required. That was pre-Twitter (for me at least), but it was almost certainly as part of the company’s reaction to Jeff Jarvis’ highly publicised experience.
  • Another example, was Biffa – after a near miss with one of their drivers on a zebra crossing earier this year and a cathargic blog post by me, their PR agency picked up my comments and passed it to one of their directors. After I provided more information, the company tracked down the driver and took appropriate action (although the promise to replace my broken iPhone headphones seems to have fallen down a crack…).
  • On Twitter, @iPass were very responsive to issues using their service on Virgin Trains until they respectfully advised me to follow their support route (that’s fair enough). On the other hand, @VirginTrainsseem to monitor feedback but on respond selectively. To their credit, I tweeted about a rattling train window and they were straight back to me for details of the service and the carriage (to get it checked out) – I guess that could have been a safety issue. They also responded on my comments re: overcrowding/the need for more standard class seating (longer trains on the way) but apparently ignored many other items of feedback (like the issues with their on-train Wi-Fi).
  • @LondonMidland is more responsive. When I had issues following a change of mobile payment provider for their station car parks, they got back to me and even offered to help if I was unable to make payment before catching my train. When a train was cancelled and 150 people (I guess) were left waiting just a few miles from it’s original destination so that the driver could end his shift on time, they explained that there were ongoing issues in their relationship with the railway driver’s union.
  • @O2 responded to a tweet/blog post about their poor account management processes and at least managed to retain me as a voice customer, even though my data had since been transferred to Three. @VodafoneUK is pretty responsive on Twitter. Meanwhile @3uk is missing a trick…
  • @BTCares responded to a tweet I wrote about their poor service (I don’t recall the details now), but I got the distinct feeling that it was about appearing to be responsive, rather than caring (@BTDoesntCare doesn’t sound quite so good!). My friend Garry Martin’s recent conversations with @BT_UK would seem to back that up – first he couldn’t even get a response on the BT Infinity delays in his city, then @BT_UK replied with what was effectively an online shrug of the shoulders.

I’m sure I can list many more examples (both good and bad) but I think my point is becoming clear. As Jeff Jarvis wrote six years ago (quiting from a book published in 1999!):

“This is a story of customer relations in the new age – an age when, to quote blogger and Cluetrain Manifesto co-author Doc Searls, “‘consumer’ is an industrial-age word, a broadcast-age word. […] Now consumers don’t just consume. We spit back. We have our own printing presses.”

[Jeff Jarvis, “My Dell Hell”, Guardian 2005]

Even so, eConsultancy reported that 25% of retailers are unresponsive on social media. Sure, retail is just one part of the overall B2C market but that sounds pretty low to me in this day and age.

It seems that many companies are creating Twitter or Facebook presences (just as in the late 1990s we were all setting up corporate websites) but there are some fundamental differences with social media:

Domain management for Office 365 (Small Business)

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 14 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about configuring DNS for Exchange Online in Office 365. In that post, I mentioned that Microsoft is only supporting small business customers with domains that are delegated to (i.e. hosted on) Microsoft’s name servers – currently ns1.bdm.microsoftonline.com and ns2.bdm.microsoftonline.com.

I wasn’t entirely comfortable with this (for a start, the Office 365 DNS Manager is best described as “basic”), so I decided to see what happens if I went through the process, but never actually switched over the name server records… as it happens it seems to work quite well (albeit in an unsupported manner).

If you want to retain control of settings, all that’s involved is creating the same records with an external DNS provider.

For reference, on the markwilson.co.uk domain, these would be:

markwilson.co.uk. 3600 IN MX 0 markwilson-co-uk.mail.eo.outlook.com.
autodiscover 3600 IN CNAME autodiscover.outlook.com.
markwilson.co.uk. 3600 IN TXT “v=spf1 include:outlook.com ~all”
SRV _sip _tls 443 1 100 sipdir.online.lync.com. markwilson.co.uk 3600
SRV _sipfederationtls _tcp 5061 1 100 sipfed.online.lync.com. markwilson.co.uk 3600

Of course, if Microsoft changes the server names, you won’t be notified and that might affect your service but the settings seem to be the same as the ones provided to Enterprise customers as part of their domain management process.

Then, go through the normal process to add a domain to Office 365, but just click Next on the Edit Name Server Records page:

Ignore the step that advises changing DNS entries

At the time of writing, Office 365 is still in beta, so things could change (for example, the domain verification process has already switched from using CNAME records to using either TXT or MX records) but it might be worth a try…

[Update 20 June 2011: Microsoft has documented a workaround for domains that do not allow delegation (specifically for .NO and .DK but I see no reason why other domains should not be used in this way)]

Microsoft’s Windows Azure datacentres: some statistics

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 14 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Last week I blogged about designing a private cloud infrastructure, based on the practices employed by the major cloud service providers.

Today I got a taste of the scale of some of those cloud operations, when Microsoft gave an online presentation on Windows Azure to their International Customer Advisory Board (ICAB) for Server and Cloud (of which I’m a participant).

Remember the shipping contains that I mentioned as units of scale in a modern datacentre? Here are a few stats about Microsoft’s Azure datacentres:

  • Each datacentre runs at around 95°F (or 35°C): that’s pretty warm but, even though there is air conditioning installed, it’s rarely used, as the containers are self-cooling (using a water system).
  • Containers are stacked in units that are two high and then connected to power, water and networks. (Now that’s some appliance!)

Microsoft's Azure appliances

  • Each container unit contains around 2500 servers and a whole datacentre has 360,000 servers.

Inside onr of the containers

  • The containers are normally dark – I described resource decay in my earlier post – that means that it’s rarely necessary to enter the datacentre.
  • In fact, the datacentres are so highly automated, that there are just 12 staff: 9 armed security guards and 3 administrators. (I’m guessing that’s working 3 shifts, so only 3 or 4 on duty at any one time.)
  • Humans are never alone – systems exist to ensure that people can only enter in pairs, and leave in pairs too.
  • So far, Microsoft has spent $2.5bn on its six Azure data centres, with more planned (and that doesn’t include the datacentres for its other operations).

Usage profiles for mobile devices

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 14 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

A few weeks ago, an agency presented some statistics to me about mobile apps.  Unfortunately, although I did ask for permission to use the statistics, I don’t have details of the source but I thought they were interesting to present on this blog, particularly in the light of Forrester CEO George Colony’s keynote comments on the “App Internet” at the Forrester IT Forum last month.

Mobile devices are changing the way we consume and engage digitally:

  • 66% [of mobile device owners] say they can’t live without their phone.
  • 64% [of mobile device owners] say mobiles and the Internet have made our life better.
  • 71% of smartphone owners have downloaded [at least one] app.
  • 28% [of Internet users] connect to the Internet via a mobile [device].
  • 20% of all Christmas online sales in 2010 were via a mobile [device].

What I found particularly interesting were two usage patterns that were presented to me for reading articles on smartphones and on tablets:

iPhone usage spikes

Smartphone users exhibited four spikes at:

  • 6am (early morning/breakfast).
  • 9am (start of work day).
  • 5-6pm (end of work day commute).
  • 8-10pm (couch/prime time, bed time).

Meanwhile, tablet devices are more likely to read at personal prime time – i.e. at the most relaxing time of the day:

iPad usage spikes

I’m not sure that I fit either of these profiles as I tend to use my tablet (my iPad) for my morning/evening commutes, and late at night (in bed) – in between I’m on a laptop, with occasional triaging of email (but not really reading articles) on a smartphone (an iPhone). Nevertheless, it’s interesting to see this marked difference in usage patterns for two classes of mobile device.

Designing a private cloud infrastructure

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 14 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

A couple of months ago, Facebook released a whole load of information about its servers and datacentres in a programme it calls the Open Compute Project. At around about the same time, I was sitting in a presentation at Microsoft, where I was introduced to some of the concepts behind their datacentres.  These are not small operations – Facebook’s platform currently serves around 600 million users and Microsoft’s various cloud properties account for a good chunk of the Internet, with the Windows Azure appliance concept under development for partners including Dell, HP, Fujitsu and eBay.

It’s been a few years since I was involved in any datacentre operations and it’s interesting to hear how times have changed. Whereas I knew about redundant uninterruptible power sources and rack-optimised servers, the model is now about containers of redundant servers and the unit of scale has shifted.  An appliance used to be a 1U (pizza box) server with a dedicated purpose but these days it’s a shipping container full of equipment!

There’s also been a shift from keeping the lights on at all costs, towards efficiency. Hardly surprising, given that the IT industry now accounts for around 3% of the world’s carbon emissions and we need to reduce the environmental impact.  Google’s datacentre design best practices are all concerned with efficiency: measuring power usage effectiveness; measuring managing airflow; running warmer datacentres; using “free” cooling; and optimising power distribution.

So how do Microsoft (and, presumably others like Amazon too) design their datacentres? And how can we learn from them when developing our own private cloud operations?

Some of the fundamental principles include:

  1. Perception of infinite capacity.
  2. Perception of continuous availability.
  3. Drive predictability.
  4. Taking a service provider approach to delivering infrastructure.
  5. Resilience over redundancy mindset.
  6. Minimising human involvement.
  7. Optimising resource usage.
  8. Incentivising the desired resource consumption behaviour.

In addition, the following concepts need to be adopted to support the fundamental principles:

  • Cost transparency.
  • Homogenisation of physical infrastructure (aggressive standardisation).
  • Pooling compute resource.
  • Fabric management.
  • Consumption-based pricing.
  • Virtualised infrastructure.
  • Service classification.
  • Holistic approach to availability.
  • Computer resource decay.
  • Elastic infrastructure.
  • Partitioning of shared services.

In short, provisioning the private cloud is about taking the same architectural patterns that Microsoft, Amazon, et al use for the public cloud and implementing them inside your own data centre(s). Thinking service, not server to develop an internal infrastructure as a service (IaaS) proposition.

I won’t expand on all of the concepts here (many are self-explanitory), but some of the key ones are:

  • Create a fabric with resource pools of compute, storage and network, aggregated into logical building blocks.
  • Introduced predictability by defining units of scale and planning activity based on predictable actions (e.g. certain rates of growth).
  • Design across fault domains – understand what tends to fail first (e.g. the power in a rack) and make sure that services span these fault domains.
  • Plan upgrade domains (think about how to upgrade services and move between versions so service levels can be maintained as new infrastructure is rolled out).
  • Consider resource decay – what happens when things break?  Think about component failure in terms of service delivery and design for that. In the same way that a hard disk has a number of spare sectors that are used when others are marked bad (and eventually too many fail, so the disk is replaced), take a unit of infrastructure and leave faulty components in place (but disabled) until a threshold is crossed, after which the unit is considered faulty and is replaced or refurbished.

A smaller company, with a small datacentre may still think in terms of server components – larger organisations may be dealing with shipping containers.  Regardless of the size of the operation, the key to success is thinking in terms of services, not servers; and designing public cloud principles into private cloud implementations.

Office 365 message filtering (and a horrible little bug that leaves email addresses exposed…)

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 14 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

One of my concerns with my recent switch from Google Apps Mail to Microsoft Office 365 was about spam email. You see, I get none.  Well, when I say I get none, I get plenty but it’s all trapped for me. With no effort on my part. Only a handful of missed spam messages in the last 2 or 3 years and almost as few false positives too.

I’ve had the same email address for about 12 years now (I think), and it’s been used all over the web. Some of my friends are more particular though – and, perhaps understandably, were annoyed when I accidentally emailed around 40 people with e-mail addresses visible in the To: field today. Except that I hadn’t intended to.

I think I’ve found a bug in Office 365’s Outlook Web App (at least, I hope it’s not closed as “by design”, assuming I find out how to file a bug report). If I send to a distribution group, it automatically expands the addresses and displays them to all recipients. That’s bad.

The annoying thing is that, previously, I had been BCCing the recipients. I have a feeling that at least one organisation was rejecting my mail because there was nothing in the To: field (although it didn’t like Google’s propensity to send mail from one domain “on behalf of” another address either), so I thought I’d use a list instead and the recipients would see the list name, rather than the actual email addresses. Thankfully it was only sent to my closest freinds and family (although that’s not really the point).

So, back to spam and Office 365 – does it live up to my previous experience with Google Apps Mail? Actually, yes I think it does. I’ve had to teach it a couple of safe senders and block a couple of others, but it really was just a handful and it’s settled down nicely.

All of Microsoft’s cloud-based e-mail services use Forefront Online Protection for Exchange. Enterprise administrators have some additional functionality (adapting SCL thresholds, etc.) but things seem to be working pretty well on my small business account too. Digging around in the various servers that the mail passes through sees hosts at bigfish.com and frontbridge.com – Frontbridge was an aquisition that has become part of Exchange Hosted Services (and it started out as Bigfish Communications) – so the technology is established, and another Microsoft property (Hotmail) is a pretty good test bed to find and filter the world’s spam.

Should we gamify the workplace?

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 14 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Gamification is certainly one of this year’s buzzwords and the science of gamification (i.e. the use of game mechanics/dynamics to drive game-like engagement and actions in non-game environments) is a topic of great interest to me at the moment.

But how can we use gamification in the workplace? And should we even try?

Whilst it’s true that there is a moral hazard to avoid, the trick to successful gamification is making sure it doesn’t feel like the target is being played. Let’s take an example that well established in the workplace: flexitime. The motivation is for an employee to accrue enough additional work time to “earn” a day off; ability is controlled by the rules that govern the flexitime scheme; and the trigger is the point where sufficient “credit” is available to take some additional leave!

I have to admit that flexitime is not one of my benefits at Fujitsu but for those businesses that have such as scheme, it has benefits in terms of employee flexibility and morale. And there are other examples where we can re-engineer our business processes and introduce some elements of gamification.

Take, for example, the idea of a results-oriented work environment. What if, instead of being paid a salary, or an hourly rate, employees were given the opportunity to pick and choose their work and remunerated accordingly? Critics may see such an approach as a return to factory processes and piecework. Others may see an opportunity to free themselves from their 9 to 5 (or 8 to 6, or 6 to 8 work routine) and work in a more flexible manner. My background is as a solutions architect. What if projects were to be crowdsourced so that a pool or architects to pick tasks from a list of activities? Different values could be attributed depending on the difficulty or time sensitivity of the task, with all architects having to achieve a minimum number of credits (but the ability to earn more if they so desired). I’m sure there many human resources issues to overcome but I can see this being the “normal” way to work in future.

Problems come when the gamification feels controlling and is associated with “Big Brother”. We have to accept that one size does not fit all – and there is a risk that employees may feel disconnected, or that they are being patronised. Most people are smart and can work out how to “game” the system – so the game mechanics need to be honed to balance motivation and ability, and to trigger employees at the appropriate times.

If we gamify the workplace though, it seems there’s a risk of destroying some of the other elements of successful collaboration. The workplace is far more than just a literal place to work. There are social and environmental aspects to consider too. If we create an internal market of competing architects what’s the difference between that and a group of independant contractors working on a project? At what point do people stop working for a common purpose (the company’s mission) and start working for their own goals? People can’t be our most important asset when we don’t have any people any more!

It may be that gamification is not appropriate for mainstream activities but can be used for those on the periphery – those that are considered extra-curricular. For example, whilst I’d like everyone to want to contribute to our Open Innovation Community, the reality is that people can opt in or out. What if we were able to gamify the innovation process with a system of rewards?

This post doesn’t really provide any answers – it does pose some questions though. How would you feel about the gamification of your work environment? And would you consider there are significant advantages to be gained, or is the risk of disruption just too great?

[This post originally appeared on the Fujitsu UK and Ireland CTO Blog and was written with assistance from Ian Mitchell and Vin Hughes.]