The Business Process Game

Recently, gamification – the augmentation of work with game elements – attracted tremendous interest and has become one of the most important trends in digital business strategy1. In this paper, the authors elaborate on the opportunities to gamify operative business process management, in particular process enactment, and show various ways to engage process participants in their daily work, support them achieving their goals, and develop their skills. A concrete implementation of gamification in business process management is shown on a use case and a detailed discussion of future research is given. 1 Gamification in Business Process Management Gamification is the discipline utilizing game elements, such as points, badges, and leaderboards, and experience design, e.g., game play, play space, and story line, to engage and motivate people to achieve their goals [1,2]. It targets at customers, communities of interest, and employees – in particular knowledge workers – as players and focuses their goals through player centered design [5]. To create value with a gamified solution the sponsoring organization needs to align supported player’s goals with their own goals. In this paper, we concentrate on the fact that gamification strives to engage knowledge workers to reach their goals by incorporating game elements into the context of their tasks and responsibilities within an organization’s business processes. Motivation is seen as a means to support the worker in changing behaviors, in acquiring new skills, and building on existing expertise and performance. With regards to business process management (BPM), we focus on the process participant, who carries out parts of business processes. Besides the execution of tasks in the context of the process, this includes to understand the underlying process model, its technical and organizational environment, i.e., resources and interaction partners, as well as documenting the results of the operations carried out. In contrast, other research approaches, for example, described by Santorum et al. [6,7] resort to social aspects, motivation, and gamification of process formalization and analysis, process modeling, and simulation. Hence, by introducing game elements to operational aspects of BPM – becoming skilled in new processes, enacting them, and their improvement – we aim at 1 http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2702117 T. S. Heinze, T. M. Prinz (Eds.): Services and their Composition, 7th Central European Workshop, ZEUS 2015, Jena, Germany, 19-20 February 2015, Proceedings – published at http://ceur-ws.org The Business Process Game 27 the process participant as our main game character or player. For this purpose, we introduce the following game elements. Process scores Participants can receive scores for each business process they are involved in. The sum of scores for one process represents the participant’s progress in mastering the process. Badges, leaderboards Upon exceeding a score thresholds, participants are awarded with badges to publicly show their progress. Often, new features and responsibilities are associated with earned badges. Points For each earned process score, the participant receives a point in their personal account. In contrast to process scores, these points can be traded for certain features or benefits. Challenges Challenges are particular efforts that need to be carried out to gain additional scores. Challenges, in particular, offer an opportunity to foster the collaboration between different process participants. In general, collaboration requires to handover work to other participants, which often results in delays in a business process as the receiving person needs to familiarize themselves with the incoming work. Hence, by challenging collaboration, we envision participants to work together more closely, e.g., in concise personal meetings. 2 Stages and Badges in Mastering a Business Process As mentioned above, we aim at supporting process participants in mastering business processes. Therefore, we have identified three principal stages that describe, how familiar a participant is with a business process. Badges are associated with each stage, as stated in Figure 1. Here, we provide only the main badges that need to be earned to enter the next stage. To implement the approach, more badges should be awarded while traversing each stage, respectively. ONBOARDING ENACTMENT IMPROVEMENT & MENTORING Master Champion Apprentice Guru Figure 1. Stages and badges of mastering a business process Onboarding. At the beginning of the onboarding phase, the participant has no experience at all in carrying out the business process. This can be the case if the participant has been assigned new responsibilities or the process has been newly introduced or recently re-engineered. This phase is closely related with the first achievement, the apprentice badge, which is earned by familiarizing oneself with the business process. Process scores are earned by collecting information, and thus acquiring knowledge, about the process. 28 Nico Herzberg and Matthias Kunze On the one hand, passing this stage can be achieved by setting up artificial cases in the fashion of a role-playing game: Apprentices are faced with a simulation of historic cases of the business process and need to carry them out. They need to take the right choices, access the right information, interact with adequate resources, and meet predetermined deadlines. On the other hand or subsequent to the role-play, the apprentice tackles real cases under the supervision of more experienced participants who mastered the same process such that they earned the champion badge. Enactment. Once apprentices have gathered sufficient experience in the process, i.e., their process score surmounts a certain threshold, they are awarded with the process master badge and are ready to perform the business process without the supervision of a mentor. Nevertheless, mentors remain available for assistance, thus fostering collaboration between colleagues. The enactment stage is the main stage and will be discussed further in Section 3. Process scores are earned by individual or collaborative performance and improvement. That is, getting better at carrying out operations, e.g., increasing the quality of results and the timeliness of documentation, and getting faster, e.g., reduce waiting and execution times or executing more cases. Key performance indicators can be used to align operational goals of business processes with the performance of process participants. However, such measurements must be designed carefully and transparently as not to counter collaboration or other quality or performance goals. Improvement and Mentoring. Burke [1] states that gamification works best with intrinsic motivation, i.e., the emotional urge to personal development. One of these intrinsic factors is personal assistance, i.e., if persons are able to help, they receive implicit and explicit praise. Another intrinsic driver is the establishment of a positive impact on one’s environment, e.g., a business process. Both require a high skill in process mastery, and therefore such process participants are awarded with the champion badge. So far, we envision two ways to leverage intrinsic motivation. First, a very experienced process participant can become a mentor, who advices apprentices in the onboarding stage. Second, process participants can contribute to the improvement of business processes, both actively and passively. Actively, they can propose changes to the business process to improve its outcome or performance. Passive contribution can be carried out by “betting” points on a proposed change. If the change is applied successfully, passive contributors earn the amount of their stake and the proposer earns an amount that relates to the sum of stakes put into the proposal. If a business process is re-engineered, existing champions may be downgraded as they need to first familiarize themselves with the new process. However, the proposer and supporters of a change, who certainly understood it well, remain in the position of a process champion. When applying gamification to BPM, one needs to bear in mind that the execution of a business process is, in general, a collaborative effort. That means that different people with different roles are involved as well as interaction partners, e.g., from The Business Process Game 29 other departments or organizations. However, as gamification aims at motivating individuals, any means to employ it in business processes requires well defined and transparent measures for the individual performance of process participants. We elaborate on this in the next section. 3 Gamified BPM in Action In the following, we present a gamified BPM solution with the example of a process for specifying a job that we designed with a German health insurance provider, see Figure 2. The process is mainly driven by the organization development (expanded pool) but needs input from other departments of the company with which it interacts. The principles of gamification can be applied to onboard new process participants, to execute the process efficiently, and to set a scene for process improvement, as elaborated on in Section 2. In this section, we focus on the efficient execution of the process. request