Silvia Schacht

Start the Game: Increasing User Experience of Enterprise Systems Following a Gamification Mechanism

“Hi dear, how was your day?” In the rarest of cases the responded would answer: “I had so much fun when entering the customer data into our Enterprise Systems.” However, the usage of Enterprise Systems is nowadays for many employees a key element of their working activities. Therefore, their motivation to use these systems consistently is essential for organizations to ensure transparency and process accuracy. While today most software products have a high usability, they lack in positive user experiences such as fun. One trend having the potential to solve this issue is Gamification. Using mechanisms of traditional games such as achievements or rankings is successfully implemented in private applications such as social networks (e.g. Facebook) or online traveling portals (e.g. tripadvisor). These mechanisms motivate individuals to perform certain activities they would otherwise not do. Gabe Zichermann – a visionary of Gamification – explained this phenomenon as following: Games are the only force in the known universe that can get people to take actions against their self-interest, in a predictable way, without using force. The principle of Gamification and its potential in organizations is presented in this book chapter.

A review of the nature and effects of guidance design features

Guidance design features in information systems are used to help people in decision-making, problem solving, and task execution. Various information systems instantiate guidance design features, which have specifically been researched in the field of decision support systems for decades. However, due to the lack of a common conceptualization, it is difficult to compare the research findings on guidance design features from different literature streams. This article reviews and analyzes the work of the research streams of decisional guidance, explanations, and decision aids conducted in the last 25years. Building on and grounded by the analyzed literature, we theorize an integrated taxonomy on guidance design features. Applying the taxonomy, we discuss existing empirical results, identify effects of different guidance design features, and propose opportunities for future research. Overall, this article contributes to research and practice. The taxonomy allows researchers to describe their work by using a set of dimensions and characteristics and to systematically compare existing research on guidance design features. From a practice-oriented perspective, we provide an overview on design features to support implementing guidance in various types of information systems. Encompassing overview on guidance design features from 25years of researchIntegrated taxonomy on guidance design features based on three literature streamsOverview on effects and outcomes of guidance design features

Design Principles for a Social Question and Answers Site: Enabling User-to-User Support in Organizations

The adoption of consumer technology in organizations, termed as IT consumerization, alters the IT infrastructure of many organizations. Letting employees decide which IT tools to use for their work increases the complexity of the organizational IT landscape and immediately raises the question how to provide adequate support given the multitude of technologies. Bring-Your-Own-Device advocates argue that employees can provide IT support on their own. An established concept to provide user-to-user support are social questions & answers sites (SQA). While such community sites are perfectly suited for exploratory problem solving, they lack however suitability to help solving specific problems subject to a specific organization. Moreover, receiving fast ad-hoc help in SQA is rather unlikely, as communication is always indirect and experts to solve the problem are unknown beforehand. The work presented in this paper explores key design characteristics of SQA sites in organizations that overcome the shortcoming of public SQA sites. Based on existing IS literature, we identify four kernel theories that are relevant for SQA sites in organizations and derive meta-requirements from them. In a next step, we analyze five public SQA sites to identify common design principles of SQA sites that are already applied. The main part of our analysis matches the identified design principles with the formulated meta-requirements to address potential gaps with respect to an enterprise environment. We conclude our research with the suggestion of additional design principles for SQA sites that account for their application in an organizational context.

How to prevent reinventing the wheel?: design principles for project knowledge management systems

Today, many companies still struggle in documenting and reusing the knowledge gained by project teams. However, knowledge only creates value if it is applied. There exists a vast amount of research in the field of knowledge management focusing on documentation, storage and exchange of knowledge, but knowledge reuse is often omitted by researchers. The presented work aims to close this gap by developing a project knowledge management system enabling project teams to apply company-internal knowledge. We followed an action design research approach to explore meta-requirements in a case company, translate these requirements into design principles and test the design principles by evaluating an artifact of a project knowledge management system. By our work, the knowledge management research field can benefit since our design theory extends the existing body of knowledge. Furthermore, our research results are instantiated in a concrete artifact which can be directly transferred into practice.

A Methodology for Systematic Project Knowledge Reuse

Managing what we know appears to be one of the challenges of the Knowledge Age that seems to be an insoluble mystery. Despite 40 years of research in the knowledge management field and an overwhelming amount of research providing knowledge management strategies, practitioners are still struggling in managing what they know. Project teams, for example, are repeating mistakes and reinventing already known solutions. In this chapter, we discuss research results in the knowledge management field and emphasize the importance of knowledge reuse. As knowledge only provides an added value when it is actually applied, we focus our research specifically on knowledge reuse and present a new methodology for systematic project knowledge reuse.

Project Knowledge Management While Simply Playing! Gaming Mechanics in Project Knowledge Management Systems

Project knowledge management underlies many issues: lacking time and high effort for documenting project insights, less motivation of project team members to share their knowledge, or the “not-invented-here-syndrome” when employees should reuse project-related knowledge. In consequence, mistakes will be repeated or already known solutions will be reinvented. Since many years, researchers focus their studies in knowledge management in order to solve such issues. Some researchers try to understand reasons for insufficient knowledge management or determine factors influencing knowledge creation, documentation, transfer and reuse. Others design information systems aiming to support individuals, teams or organizations to manage what they know. However, as far as we know, no researcher considers gamification as possible mechanism to engage and motivate project teams to manage their project-related insights. Although our research originally did not consider gamification we intuitively implemented some typical gamification elements in order to engage individuals to participate in project knowledge management.

Projekterfahrungen spielend einfach mit der ProjectWorld! - Ein gamifiziertes Projektwissensmanagementsystem

ZusammenfassungWissensmanagement ist eine komplexe Aufgabe, welche oftmals von existierenden Wissensmanagementsystemen nur unzureichend unterstützt wird. Insbesondere in Projekten, in welchen Projektmitarbeiter meist einen heterogenen Hintergrund haben und nur für eine begrenzte Zeit zusammenarbeiten, ist das Wissensmanagement eine große Herausforderung. Projektwissen wird nur selten dokumentiert und noch seltener wiederverwendet, da die Projektmitglieder keine Zeit und wenig Motivation für dessen Dokumentation haben. Als Konsequenz daraus werden oftmals bereits bekannte Lösungen gefunden und Projektteams machen die gleichen Fehler wie ihre Vorgänger. Gamification stellt eine Lösung für dieses Problem dar, da es darauf abzielt, die aktive Teilnahme in Anwendungssystemen zu motivieren. Der vorliegende Beitrag beschreibt die Gestaltung und Umsetzung eines gamifizierten Projektwissensmanagementsystems, genannt ProjectWorld, in einem Unternehmen. Die ProjectWorld zielt darauf ab, Mitarbeiter zu motivieren, sich dauerhaft am Wissensmanagement zu beteiligen und ihr Wissen mit anderen Mitarbeitern zu teilen. Obwohl noch keine konkreten, empirisch fundierten Ergebnisse bezüglich langfristiger Effekte auf die Wissensdokumentation und –wiederverwendung vorliegen, kann man, basierend auf qualitative Aussagen der potentiellen Nutzer, positive Auswirkungen auf das Projektwissensmanagement im Unternehmen annehmen.AbstractKnowledge management is a complex endeavor which is often insufficiently supported by existing knowledge management systems. In particular, projects suffer from challenges of project knowledge management, since its team members are highly heterogeneous with regard to their background and work together for only a limited duration. Thus, project knowledge is rarely documented and even more rarely reused due to a lack of time and low motivation of team members. As a consequence, project teams are finding already known solutions or make the same mistakes like previous projects. Gamification is a new trend which promises to solve these issues, since it aims to motivate system users to engage in application systems. This article describes the design and realization of a gamified project knowledge management system named ProjectWorld in a company. ProjectWorld aims to motivate employees to engage in knowledge management and to share their knowledge within the organization. Although, at an early stage with no empirical results regarding the effects of the gamified system on knowledge documentation and reuse, it can be assumed—based on qualitative statements of potential users—that ProjectWorld will have positive impacts on the project knowledge management of the company.

Projektwissen spielend einfach managen mit der ProjectWorld

Die Autoren zeigen einen neuen Weg auf, gamifizierte Wissensmanagementsysteme mit der Anwendung spielerischer Elemente zu gestalten, und beschreiben die Anforderungserhebung, die Gestaltung und Evaluation des Systems. Hierbei gehen sie auf die theoretischen Grundlagen sowie die Umsetzung und Nutzung in einem Unternehmen ein. Mithilfe von Gamification-Mechanismen sollen Projektteams dazu motiviert werden, ihr Wissen und ihre Erfahrungen zu dokumentieren und in anderen Projekten wiederzuverwenden. Damit erhalt der Leser einen umfassenden Einblick in die Theorie und Praxis des modernen Wissensmanagements in Projekten.

User guidance for document-driven processes in enterprise systems

In practice up to 80% of the overall processed data is only available in an unstructured form, such as documents. The handling of documents within organizations is still an issue in both, research and practice. Employees perceive the way to handle business-relevant documents as high effort and struggle with handling documents compliant to organizational standards. As a result documents become decoupled from the defined business processes and scattered all over the organizations IT landscape. Understanding users and their needs in order to increase their intention to use Enterprise Systems consistent to organization-wide business processes is a gap in the existing literature. This paper presents a design science research project focusing on user guidance for document-driven processes in Enterprise Systems. Building on existing research in user guidance, we suggest to increase the users individual awareness towards processing documents consistent to organizational processes. In addition to our research design, we present a preliminary artifact version based on the results of an exploratory interview study.

AskEris--A Many-to-One Communication Platform for Higher Education

In recent years much research has been conducted examining the opportunities of using modern Web 2.0 applications in teaching. Today, wikis, forums, pod casts or classical email communication are widely used media through which students can get in touch with their instructors or can discuss certain topics with each other. However, the usage of so-called many-to one communication, where a number of persons transmit their messages to one recipient, has been considered only rarely. In this paper, we present Askeris - an innovative many-to-one communication platform for higher education. It bases on previous investigations regarding various communication forms and their use in higher education. In this article, we describe its development and benefits. Finally, we provide insights into the evaluation of Askeris. Due to the positive results of this evaluation, Asker is was forwarded to the internal university computer center, which integrated Asker is into the university-wide document and communication platform.