I do play video games, one of the things that the current video game world right is achievements. Most of the current game console has this support or some kind, there’s even an open platform for it running on the iOS landscape. But the company with the best implementation is Microsoft. Their Xbox Live platform is second to none.
So back to the post, can we do something like that in the office. You got your list of software/system [the games] runing. This can be part of an employee KPI. Set of software to be Achievable can be listed, you got your office productivity suite [since this runs locally, tad harder to centralize their usage], then the email/exchange, document management, SAP [what software type is SAP], any web services, even phone [not the personal one].
Then to each of them we can set achievements; already have a thought about it;
- The usual first send, first received,
- Then the important ones, response time, total number, total attachment.
- Then the interesting stuff, received personal mail from CEO, sends mail past midnight,
- And the troubling item, time lapsed between login, highest pending email.
And then just like in videogames, you put funny description to it. Something funny yet indicating something significant. The idea is to encourage the use of said software, esp something that is freshly rolled out. Aside from using the software itself, the achievement can also be a driving factor for any user to explore the software, hence learn more. This is where a little creativity will helps a lot.
Aside from that this will also deter user from doing stuff that they should not be doing. Like sending a lot of personal main thriugh the company account. Because they know their action is being monitored at all time. You can’t expect to received the ‘I’ve Sent the 1,000,000th Email’ Achievement without raising some flags.
Unlike Live it will be impossible for everyone to get the same set of achievements. All employees will have difference function access to any software. So the engineer wouldn’t be getting any Accounting type achievement.
Some people will find the system a bit intrusive, but when you’re in the office your asses belongs to the company. And just like Live this thing will be made accessible to anyone, even better to the internet. Unlike any Performance Monitoring System [System to review employee performance] which mostly involve confidential data, this system is not. But it can be use to determine any employee performance. How can you get a 5/5 when you left email unchecked for a month.
Like what happen with Xbox, there will also be the ‘Achievement Whore’ effect. One uses a software just for the sake of getting achievements. This can be a bad thing, as it will lessen the accuracy of the Achievement System. So the said system could possibly comb though the data and find any anomaly, then remove these personal from the Achievement System, like what they did with Live.
I think that it’s possible to do all these with the current stuff that we have, but it’ll need a lot of effort, and most likely it will not be realtime, [a crawler will comb data on these software DB, and figure out any Achievement received]. Then SSO is also needded. I don’t know why my company didn’t use the same login id for AD, with the one in SAP.
I’m actually trying to do said system. But for the time being I only have DB access to a few software [yeah only DB stuff, can't think of a way to apply this on productivity suite without involving IT]. Looking into Eclipse [Permit], PI and SAP [no I don't know ABAP]. Without SSO or an effort to have single ID to any system, it’s harder to map stuff intersystem.
