Business objectives

Before we can go too far down the road on any journey, we first need to be clear about where we are trying to go. This is where business objectives come into the picture. Although games are about fun, and gamification is about generating positive emotion without losing sight of the business objectives, gamification is a serious business.

Organizations spend millions of dollars every year on information technology. Consistent and steady investment in information technology is expected to bring a return on that investment in the way of improved business process flow. It's meant to help the organization run smoother and easier.

Gamification is all about "improving" business processes. Organizations try to improve the process itself, wherever possible, whereas technology only facilitates the process. Therefore, gamification efforts will be scrutinized under a similar microscope and the success metrics that information technology efforts will. The fact that customers, employees, or stakeholders are having more fun with the organization's offering is not enough. It will need to meet a business objective.

The place to start with defining business objectives is with the business process that the organization is looking to improve.

In our case, the process we are planning to improve is e-learning. We are looking at the process of K-12 aged persons learning "thinking". How does that process look right now?

In a full-blown e-learning situation, we would be looking to gamify as much of this process as possible. For our purpose, we will focus on the areas of negotiation and cooperation. According to the Negotiate and Cooperate phase of the Critical Thinking Process, learners consider different perspectives and engage in discussions with others.

This gives us a clear picture of what some of our objectives might be. They might be, among others:

Note that these objectives are measurable. We will be able to test whether the increases/improvements we are looking for are actually happening over time.

With a set of measurable objectives, we can turn our attention to the next step, that is target behaviors, in our Gamification Design Framework.