Data Gravity as Cloud Consideration – Input Output

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This week on Active Information I wrote about Dave McCrory’s newly published Data Gravity formula. If you are unfamiliar with Data Gravity:

“McCrory’s premise is that as your data migrates to the cloud, say through the use of a CRM application, it will pull related, satellite applications and services into the cloud. As those satellite applications and services produce and consume additional data, your data mass grows, increasing the gravitational pull, which migrates more applications and services to the cloud, and the cycle continues.“

For the formula, and how I see it applied, check out the post: Data Gravity as Cloud Consideration – Input Output.
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Five gamification ideas to better engage your audience

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Can you captivate your audience?
(photo credit: apogee photography)

Gamification has been all the hype for me in the past months, as it got prominently mentioned in several of the classes I took.  Are there anything valuable one can take from it after digging past the marketing hype?  My classmates and I worked together over the past few months to formulate five recommendations for a financial firm, on how it could use gamification to better engage its customers in the use of its financial planning tools.  The company loved our recommendations, and we felt that the same recommendations can be applied in many different settings.  So here they are for you to try in your own settings.

#1 Focus on the first minute

The first minute a new user interacts with the tool is extremely important, as it decides if the user will continue using the tool or if he will go somewhere else. The firm thus needs a clear idea of what it wants new users to experience during that first minute.  In the first minute, the user should not experience long, boring instructions.  He should not experience painful registration processes, or hard-to-understand terms and conditions.  Instead, he should experience the core experience of the tool.  If the core experience is fun and interactivity, he should experience it.  If the core experience is easing his financial planning tasks, he should experience it.

The challenge for delivering the experience is that there are no definite points on the firm’s website where users will enter. Users can come in through the company’s main webpage, or to the planning tools’ landing page, or even directly to one of the planning tools. How then can the firm deliver consistent first minute experience to first time users? One idea is to have a prominent button on all webpages that will take first time users to a starter page. Another idea is to focus on the navigation menu on the side or top, since it shows up on all webpages.

As part of the first minute experience, the website can ask meaningful questions to help users navigate the sea of content available. One possible question is “What are you planning to save for?” and the choices can be “Buying a car”, “Getting married”, “Buying a house”, “Children’s education”, “Retirement”, etc. Based on the user’s choice, he can be taken to content that is most relevant to what he is trying to accomplish. These questions can be asked proactively (e.g. via a pop-up questionnaire) or passively (e.g. as a section of text on a webpage). 

#2: Leverage on users’ current concerns

We interviewed 25 users on their financial planning priorities, and many of them were more concerned with near term goals like “buying a car” or “getting married” than they are with long term goals of retirement planning. These life-stage events present precious windows of opportunity that can be leveraged to deepen users’ engagement with the tool. Minimally, users will grow more familiar with the tool’s user interface. More importantly, relevant user information (e.g. amount to save each month) can be collected, which increase the chances of them coming back in the future for other related financial planning tasks.

Games implement this idea through “Challenges and Quests”, like FourSquare’s badges and Farmville’s ribbons. Through challenges and quests, users are focused on smaller and more immediate tasks, and they might use the system for tasks even though they are not interested in the system (yet…). 

#3: Provide feedback using a progress bar

Business networking site LinkedIn has a visual indicator telling users how complete their professional profile is. If a user only provided his education information, his profile might be tagged as “20% complete”. If he has included his work experience, it might be “50% complete”. This progress bar is very helpful in helping users know how complete their profiles are, and it taps on inherent motivations in humans to complete tasks.

The tool can take on similar concept: tag users as “20% complete” if he provides his monthly savings goal, “50% complete” if he adds his current assets, and so on.

LinkedIn also frames this concept using a different idea. It includes an “Improve your profile” button on users’ profile pages, and when users click on the button, it shows a number of “To-dos” that users can do to improve their profiles, highlighting the first to-do task. This is an excellent way of focusing users to the next bite-size task they can focus on to improve their profiles. 

#4: Give more free rewards, more often

It is very hard to motivate people to plan for something that will only happen 40 years later. It is said that people spend more time planning for their vacations than they do for retirement, and it is not hard to believe that, because 40 years is a very long time! It is also very easy for other tasks to take precedence since in comparison; all other tasks are more urgent.

One way around this challenge is to help users break down their long financial planning journey into “levels”, and reward users each time they attain a new level.  Thus the concept “more rewards, more often”.  For example, a user might promote into the next level when he has setup an investment plan, or if he has re-balanced his portfolio at least once in the past year.

The reward can be monetary, based on the firm’s estimation of the lifetime value of such a customer.  But there are also many other “free” rewards. The book “Gamification by Design” laid out four categories of rewards strung together by the acronym “SAPS”. Figure 1 lists the four categories along with some examples.

Reward Category
Examples
Status
Badges, Levels
Access
Lunch with CEO or celebrity, Access to the firm’s clubs, Priority queue at banks
Power

Moderator on a forum, more say in what new features to include in the tool
Stuff
Freebies

Figure 1 Four Categories of Rewards

#5: Define an engagement score

How can the firm know the impact of its gamification efforts unless it measures it? An engagement score should measure more than just the conventional page views or number of unique visitors. It should also measure how much time users spend on the website, how often they return to it, if they have registered accounts, etc. A good way to create the engagement score is to think along five dimensions: recency, frequency, duration, virality and ratings (detailed in the book “Gamification by design”).

With a good engagement score, the firm can measure where it is at before it implements gamification, and later have a clear way to assess the effectiveness of the gamification efforts. In addition, the score will also be useful for incremental calibrations, as the firm experiments with tweaks in its engagement efforts.

References

[1] Gamification by Design, “Implementing Game Mechanics in Web and Mobile Apps” By Gabe Zichermann, Christopher Cunningham
[2] Lee, H., Schlossberg, E., Seelhof, M., Teo, K. S., & Wong, M. F. (2012). Fidelity Engagement and Gamification. MIT.

One of my classmates who worked on this project also wrote about the project on his blog, check out his article “Are You Game?“.

Five gamification ideas to better engage your audience

by

Can you captivate your audience?
(photo credit: apogee photography)

Gamification has been all the hype for me in the past months, as it got prominently mentioned in several of the classes I took.  Are there anything valuable one can take from it after digging past the marketing hype?  My classmates and I worked together over the past few months to formulate five recommendations for a financial firm, on how it could use gamification to better engage its customers in the use of its financial planning tools.  The company loved our recommendations, and we felt that the same recommendations can be applied in many different settings.  So here they are for you to try in your own settings.

#1 Focus on the first minute

The first minute a new user interacts with the tool is extremely important, as it decides if the user will continue using the tool or if he will go somewhere else. The firm thus needs a clear idea of what it wants new users to experience during that first minute.  In the first minute, the user should not experience long, boring instructions.  He should not experience painful registration processes, or hard-to-understand terms and conditions.  Instead, he should experience the core experience of the tool.  If the core experience is fun and interactivity, he should experience it.  If the core experience is easing his financial planning tasks, he should experience it.

The challenge for delivering the experience is that there are no definite points on the firm’s website where users will enter. Users can come in through the company’s main webpage, or to the planning tools’ landing page, or even directly to one of the planning tools. How then can the firm deliver consistent first minute experience to first time users? One idea is to have a prominent button on all webpages that will take first time users to a starter page. Another idea is to focus on the navigation menu on the side or top, since it shows up on all webpages.

As part of the first minute experience, the website can ask meaningful questions to help users navigate the sea of content available. One possible question is “What are you planning to save for?” and the choices can be “Buying a car”, “Getting married”, “Buying a house”, “Children’s education”, “Retirement”, etc. Based on the user’s choice, he can be taken to content that is most relevant to what he is trying to accomplish. These questions can be asked proactively (e.g. via a pop-up questionnaire) or passively (e.g. as a section of text on a webpage). 

#2: Leverage on users’ current concerns

We interviewed 25 users on their financial planning priorities, and many of them were more concerned with near term goals like “buying a car” or “getting married” than they are with long term goals of retirement planning. These life-stage events present precious windows of opportunity that can be leveraged to deepen users’ engagement with the tool. Minimally, users will grow more familiar with the tool’s user interface. More importantly, relevant user information (e.g. amount to save each month) can be collected, which increase the chances of them coming back in the future for other related financial planning tasks.

Games implement this idea through “Challenges and Quests”, like FourSquare’s badges and Farmville’s ribbons. Through challenges and quests, users are focused on smaller and more immediate tasks, and they might use the system for tasks even though they are not interested in the system (yet…). 

#3: Provide feedback using a progress bar

Business networking site LinkedIn has a visual indicator telling users how complete their professional profile is. If a user only provided his education information, his profile might be tagged as “20% complete”. If he has included his work experience, it might be “50% complete”. This progress bar is very helpful in helping users know how complete their profiles are, and it taps on inherent motivations in humans to complete tasks.

The tool can take on similar concept: tag users as “20% complete” if he provides his monthly savings goal, “50% complete” if he adds his current assets, and so on.

LinkedIn also frames this concept using a different idea. It includes an “Improve your profile” button on users’ profile pages, and when users click on the button, it shows a number of “To-dos” that users can do to improve their profiles, highlighting the first to-do task. This is an excellent way of focusing users to the next bite-size task they can focus on to improve their profiles. 

#4: Give more free rewards, more often

It is very hard to motivate people to plan for something that will only happen 40 years later. It is said that people spend more time planning for their vacations than they do for retirement, and it is not hard to believe that, because 40 years is a very long time! It is also very easy for other tasks to take precedence since in comparison; all other tasks are more urgent.

One way around this challenge is to help users break down their long financial planning journey into “levels”, and reward users each time they attain a new level.  Thus the concept “more rewards, more often”.  For example, a user might promote into the next level when he has setup an investment plan, or if he has re-balanced his portfolio at least once in the past year.

The reward can be monetary, based on the firm’s estimation of the lifetime value of such a customer.  But there are also many other “free” rewards. The book “Gamification by Design” laid out four categories of rewards strung together by the acronym “SAPS”. Figure 1 lists the four categories along with some examples.

Reward Category
Examples
Status
Badges, Levels
Access
Lunch with CEO or celebrity, Access to the firm’s clubs, Priority queue at banks
Power

Moderator on a forum, more say in what new features to include in the tool
Stuff
Freebies

Figure 1 Four Categories of Rewards

#5: Define an engagement score

How can the firm know the impact of its gamification efforts unless it measures it? An engagement score should measure more than just the conventional page views or number of unique visitors. It should also measure how much time users spend on the website, how often they return to it, if they have registered accounts, etc. A good way to create the engagement score is to think along five dimensions: recency, frequency, duration, virality and ratings (detailed in the book “Gamification by design”).

With a good engagement score, the firm can measure where it is at before it implements gamification, and later have a clear way to assess the effectiveness of the gamification efforts. In addition, the score will also be useful for incremental calibrations, as the firm experiments with tweaks in its engagement efforts.

References

[1] Gamification by Design, “Implementing Game Mechanics in Web and Mobile Apps” By Gabe Zichermann, Christopher Cunningham
[2] Lee, H., Schlossberg, E., Seelhof, M., Teo, K. S., & Wong, M. F. (2012). Fidelity Engagement and Gamification. MIT.

One of my classmates who worked on this project also wrote about the project on his blog, check out his article “Are You Game?“.

SMAC: Hype or Reality?

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Have you heard the latest technology acronym that is revving up business executives? Vendors claim that SMAC – Social, Mobility, Analytics and Cloud – is the quadruple mix of technological elements that will rescue businesses from potential irrelevancy. If executives fall for the SMAC hype, they could end up smacking themselves in the forehead with regret. I read an article recently about how the Indian IT industry is shifting to take advantage of the SMAC […]

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An awesome quote and a book tip

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“If a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves… There’s so much talk about the system. […]

7 ways a Platform can fuel the App Economy

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Earlier this year a Technet sponsored study showed that in February there were roughly 466,000 jobs in the “App Economy” in the United States. This so-called App Economy had zero jobs just 5 years ago, before the iPhone was introduced. The term “App Economy” isn’t formally defined but is often used to refer to the economy that has been created due to the development and delivery of software applications for.

The post 7 ways a Platform can fuel the App Economy appeared first on The Enterprise Architect.

Time to Rain on the “Cloud Service Model” Parade

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The Cloud community have been talking recently about Everything is a Service; they call it EaaS. At first hearing it’s an interesting idea, another acronym to complement IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. Unfortunately it’s rather like the tail wagging the dog!  The Cloud community use the term Service liberally but with minimal consistency.


It must be said that the NIST reference architecture document has been incredibly helpful in sorting out the three Cloud service models of IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. However in order to read the document you have to suspend all your knowledge and belief of services and read the document interpreting all references to service as “provision or access to some capability”. In other words as a generic IS service of some sort.


Actually most Cloud infrastructure resources are provisioned as well formed services governed by interface and SLA contracts. There are a few SaaS providers that have implemented an SOA – in compliance with generally accepted principles of loose coupling, separation etc. However most Cloud services are multi-tenant application resources with integration capabilities delivered as Web services. Yet perceived wisdom generally says that SOA is essential for Cloud!


I noted an interesting paper from Intel recently[i]; the thing that really struck me was the way the paper describes how Cloud development as the Wild West (my words), and the author is advocating ideas that amount to rediscovering the SOA wheel!

SaaS and PaaS providers are circumventing traditional enterprise architecture. Compliance and visibility has decreased. Simply put, your enterprise is likely already part of the app economy. The question is, how are you managing your API traffic? Do you have a control point to manage that participation? Enterprise APIs are not science projects; they’re conducting enterprise-class business and require enterprise class visibility and control. What path can enterprises take to prepare for secure use of APIs? Dan Woods, Chief Analyst, CITO Research and Colleagues, May 2012

And the author goes on to describe how Cloud needs to move beyond point to point integration to introduce something that sounds very much like an ESB! So the notion that de facto Cloud practices should form the basis for EaaS sounds fanciful.


Yet despite this, I believe we should look closely at the idea of Everything as a Service. It’s the vision that CBDI and other pioneers painted years ago. What’s really required is a convergence of business and IT service concepts that would provide consistent views for all the various stakeholders in both IT and business domains including the service owner, business service designer, IT service architect, IT service designer, service security architect, provider, IT service manager, service broker, service consumer and so on and so forth. Today we have disparate service models in both business and IT that positively encourage silo disciplines.


To produce some form of unified service model wouldn’t be just an academic exercise.  First it might just facilitate better understanding of service architecture across business and IT stakeholders. Second it might assist in better service design, delivered services that are fully integrated with people, product, process and technology and engineered to deliver individualized services to customers that are architected to be responsive to business change!


But the place to start is to understand the needs and opportunities in a unified service model. This will leverage the Cloud, and hopefully cause more service owners to demand their services are first class software services in order to deliver better customer service. Maybe this will encourage NIST to revisit its reference architecture and give the service perspective a little more integrity.


In this month’s CBDI Journal we publish an article exploring how such a unified model might look, and the business value that it might deliver. We welcome feedback and comments.


Abstract: The Cloud movement is discussing the term Everything as a Service (EaaS or XaaS).  In principle this is a welcome development, encouraging business and IT participants to adopt services and service oriented concepts everywhere. However it appears that the E/XaaS initiative may be more about marketing than reality. In this article we suggest how this very promising idea might be developed to clarify Cloud Service taxonomy and deliver convergence of business and IT perspectives in a Unified Service Model.   

Why the Yammer Acquisition Means Almost Nothing to Your Enterprise

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I would argue that while the acquisition is great for Microsoft, and absolutely fabulous for Yammer’s investors, for most enterprises it’s not really a net positive and potentially, could be quite negative depending on your company’s disposition towards the cloud.
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