{"id":1172,"date":"2014-03-04T10:44:00","date_gmt":"2014-03-04T10:44:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/localhost\/projects\/horsesforsources\/automation-killed-the-gamification-star_030414\/"},"modified":"2014-03-04T10:44:00","modified_gmt":"2014-03-04T10:44:00","slug":"automation-killed-the-gamification-star_030414","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.horsesforsources.com\/automation-killed-the-gamification-star_030414\/","title":{"rendered":"Automation killed the gamification star"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

“Rewritten by machine and new technology,\u00a0and now I understand the problems you can see”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Source: “Video Killed the Radio Star” by the Buggles, 1979<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Yes, even back in ’79, when a portly Christian Bale wore a hairpiece and the first nudist beach<\/a> was established in the United Kingdom, the world was already beginning to zone in on the power of automation. \u00a0Well maybe it wasn’t, but we were trying to find a clever way to connect the Buggles, American Hustle with Automation and BPO… so let’s have HfS’ own automation star, Charles Sutherland<\/a>, shine some light on this one…<\/p>\n

The Stagnation of Gamification<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t that long ago that in certain circles of the outsourcing market, there was a great deal of excitement about how gamification was a trend which would have a real and meaningful impact on how work was done in delivery centers around the world.\u00a0\u00a0 Books were written<\/a>, conferences like GSummit were organized and in general there was an emerging belief that if you made even the most routine work more \u201cfun\u201d organized around mini-games, competitions, points and leaderboards rates of employee engagement and retention would rise and with that overall productivity in the outsourcing market.\u00a0 A full disclosure now, I believed in this at the time and in many respects still due although as I\u2019ll explain, I no longer see this as a wide-sweeping trend and instead as a niche approach for certain roles and workforces now in the future.\u00a0 So while the books still reside on my Kindle, I\u2019m now moving to the belief that at least in the world of BPO and GBS, it won\u2019t be the gamification of roles rather it will be the process automation of roles that will define this world over the next several years.<\/p>\n

While it\u2019s true, that gamification may not have made it into the standard discourse in the BPO and GBS marketplace, our recent study of technology trends in BPO suggests that by comparison to process automation and the members of the SMAC stack (Social, Mobility, Analytics and Cloud), Gamification is at best the present, likely the past and certainly not the future technology trend.\u00a0 What has emerged in its place is process automation.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Click to Enlarge<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Why and Why Not Gamification in BPO<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Gamification was attractive in BPO as a possible solution to some structural challenges in the industry.\u00a0 How do you keep employees engaged and retained when their daily work isn\u2019t always interesting and rarely varies?\u00a0 How do you appeal to new millennial and Gen-Y employees who live in a gamified environment earning \u201crewards\u201d such as FourSquare badges or posting their Candy Crush Saga conquests on their smartphones when they leave work each day but work on citrixed green screen mainframe claims systems during their days?\u00a0 How do you foster competition between employees to be more productive when you aren\u2019t able to shower them with direct financial rewards?\u00a0\u00a0 To these problems gamification seemed like the answer.\u00a0\u00a0 If somehow you could just make the work more \u201cfun\u201d than surely these problems would recede and the benefits would begin to accrue both to service providers and their clients.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Charles Sutherland is EVP Research, HfS (click for bio)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Only it\u2019s been hard to gamify enterprise applications or at least the ones that most employees in the BPO marketplace need to use each and every day.\u00a0 Building rewards and badges and point systems and attractive graphical interfaces has taken a back seat to just getting multiple legacy applications to speak to each other and just delivering the process in an effective and efficient manner at a lower cost.\u00a0 It turns out the theory of gamification is great but the business case is much harder to secure for a BPO contract.\u00a0 When it comes to front office staff inside an enterprise there are plenty of examples of successful products like Cognizant\u2019s Motivate<\/a> to get greater productivity and engagement but that\u2019s a much harder sell inside a BPO especially now that instead of motivating employees in mundane roles to increase productivity you can simply automate out the least exciting, most mundane of work.<\/p>\n

You still have attrition in a gamified environment and your BPO employees still get bored with flashy games and competitions as they will always want something new in the same way that people jump to the newest smartphone app or social media tool. An automated process, by contrast, is best when it doesn\u2019t change and the servers processing the work aren\u2019t asking for new screens ever.\u00a0 The business case is also clearer.\u00a0 Develop the process automation flows and then pull in the transactions and then release your employees to engage in other tasks.<\/p>\n

The Bottom-line:\u00a0Why gamify a standard process when you can replace the human element altogether?<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

To be fair we are still in the early days of the current iteration of process automation applications from the likes of IPSoft<\/a>, Blue Prism<\/a> and UIpath<\/a> to name a few and the BPO reference clients are still pending but the underlying trend seems clear.<\/p>\n

So, why invest heavily in gamifying a standard process for your BPO employees when you can replace the human element altogether? \u00a0It\u2019s for this reason that our surveyed BPO buyers clearly see that there is an increasing importance for process automation going forward, so much so that it has likely now \u201ckilled the gamification star\u201d for the future.<\/p>\n

Charles Sutherland<\/a>\u00a0(pictured right) is author of “Framing a Constitution for Robotistan<\/a>“, which you can download\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Rewritten by machine and new technology,\u00a0and now I understand the problems you can see” Source: “Video Killed the Radio Star”…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,51,77,78,81,84,90,91,831,93,832,830,837],"tags":[],"ppma_author":[19],"yoast_head":"\nAutomation killed the gamification star - Horses for Sources | No Boundaries<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.horsesforsources.com\/automation-killed-the-gamification-star_030414\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Automation killed the gamification star - Horses for Sources | No Boundaries\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"“Rewritten by machine and new technology,\u00a0and now I understand the problems you can see” Source: “Video Killed the Radio Star”...\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.horsesforsources.com\/automation-killed-the-gamification-star_030414\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Horses for Sources | No Boundaries\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2014-03-04T10:44:00+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"http:\/\/www.horsesforsources.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/Christian_Bale_Automation_Hustle.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Phil Fersht\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@pfersht\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Phil Fersht\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"5 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.horsesforsources.com\/automation-killed-the-gamification-star_030414\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.horsesforsources.com\/automation-killed-the-gamification-star_030414\/\",\"name\":\"Automation killed the gamification star - 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