Gamification Grows Up to Become a CEO's Best Friend

Dennis Byron submits: Computer Economics is out the week of April 5 with trend-confirming research on information technology jobs. The report shows a big time-series-based IT department swing away from application programmers/systems analysts to business-intelligence (BI)/business analysts. I guess I can throw away my 40-year-old programmer's diamond/rectangle template.

In some companies it's like clockwork. Every couple of years or so, somebody in the executive suite decides that what's needed to make the organization really productive is a new approach to managing people.

Though William Shakespeare once wrote that all the world’s a stage, the online world is now evolving into a series of games instead. Gamification, the integration of game design concepts into non-game scenarios, is growing increasingly popular in the business world. Though still an experimental business strategy, gamification is expected to be used by 70% of the world’s 2000 largest companies in some form by 2014 and generate $2.8 billion in consumer spending by 2016.

Dana Gardner submits:This guest post comes courtesy of Tony Baer’s OnStrategies blog. Tony is a senior analyst at Ovum.

Gamification used to rest only on the outskirts of society. It involved people staying up all hours of the night speaking in foreign tongues, living secret lives of mystical time travel, and using weapons of intelligence to reach their destination. Dungeons and Dragons was the ultimate game.

If organisations are to achieve visibility of committed spend as the purchase occurs, rather than after the event, it is essential to answer four key questions: Who is buying? Who is checking? Who is assessing procurement value? Who is managing payment processes? Gary Waylett, CEO, Eclipse Group, explains the role eProcurement can play in delivering effective spend control and expense visibility across the business. Poor Process

Guest post by Jim Manzi, founder and Chairman of Applied Predictive Technologies, and the author of Uncontrolled: The Surprising Payoff of Trial-and-Error for Business, Politics and Society.

The 451 Group: Inorganic Growth submits: By Brenon Daly