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Written by Mario Herger
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Wednesday, 27 July 2011 21:00 |
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 If you have ever stopped by at the SAP Labs Campus in Palo Alto on Hillview Avenue, you are familiar with the sight of horses neighing and riding along the grassy hills just right outside of the SAP Labs buildings. But if you hear a cacophony of pigs' grunts echoing from the SAP cafeteria, then you know that the SAP Gamification Cup demojam is on.
A few weeks ago, SAP CTO Vishal Sikka and SAP Labs Managing Director Barbara Holzapfel had invited the Palo Alto SAP employees to participate in an internal innovation event. The overarching theme was "gamification". Gamification, which Wikipedia defines as "the use of game play mechanics for non-game applications [..] to encourage users to engage in desired behaviors in connection with the applications", is a current industry trend, that influences business software (and makes a lot of sense). Similar to the social media trend 2 years ago, it is going to stay.
For the SAP Gamification Cup, Vishal and Barbara sent us on a "mission". A mission to understand gamification and to apply it to business software and business processes. For that, SAP employees were invited to submit their ideas, form teams, create software prototypes and show a six-minute demo at the demojam on June 14th to a jury consisting of SAP executives and external experts.
During four weeks, we had kicked off the event with a keynote (followed by a one day workshop) from Amy Jo Kim, had secured the support of the gamification platform providers Badgeville and Bunchball, who taught us about their platforms and gave us access to them for the contestants, had listened to Jeff Gillis from Google talk about gamification efforts at his former company (he had just left Google a few days earlier after 8 years of a great ride with them), had learned from SAP's SVP for User Experience Dan Rosenberg about the importance (and common misconceptions) of this topic and gotten tons of user success stories from Mark Yolton, SVP of SAP's largest and most successful gamified system, the SAP Community Network.
Beside the promise of a lot of fun and pushing the edge of innovation, the contestants motivation to participate was of the purest of all: to help SAP make software with excellent user experience. Ha, I got you! You should have seen your face. Of course that fairly competitive bunch of contestants was only interested in winning the iPad 2 and the free tickets to the upcoming SAP TechEd in Las Vegas.
Around 50 colleagues picked up the gauntlet and started the mission. They formed 12 teams, including colleagues from SAP Research Dresden, SAP Labs Nice, SAP Labs Bangalore and SAP in Walldorf. The participants and lurkers followed the event in the SAP internal Gamification @ SAP group, where they shared ideas, reached out for help or simply bragged. Read the full blog with all examples and images on the SAP Community Network. 
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