What a great way to start 2012. IBM Business Partner, ISW (the same business partner that created iWildfire for iPhone and iPad and Wildfire for Notes) announced that it's now providing gaming capabilities within IBM Connections.

I caught a demo of the add-on yesterday and it looks very good. Out of the box, it comes with a variety of badges that users earn based on various metrics and achievements within IBM Connections. When you go to a user's profile, you can see the various badges that they have earned and their progress towards other badges.

Administrators can define their own badges and metrics (the actions that users must take to obtain a badge). For example, you can configure that a badge is awarded when 30 files have been shared with more than 100 tags as shown here:

You can even tie with external systems. For example, you can create badges that are awarded to members of the sales team once they achieve their quarterly quota and show that within Connections.

Gamification is a way to drive adoption of a new platform. For companies that have rolled out IBM Connections, you may want to consider this add-on to drive adoption of the platform. In the words of ISW:

ISW has performed many implementations of IBM Connections and we have found that a significant factor in organisations driving real business value is ensuring strong user adoption. In addition, providing guidance to users to leverage all of the capabilities of Connections rather than just individual capabilities is a key success factor. The key is to help users understand "Why?" they should leverage social software to work better. An important strategy for encouraging user adoption is providing reward mechanism's, both tangible and intangible. Kudos Badges for IBM Connections provides this strategy in a very powerful and flexible way.

To learn more about Kudos for IBM Connections, go here.

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