Gamification of health

We all know playing games can be fun, and we all know staying healthy is important. (I write this, ironically, as I bite into a doughnut!). Doesn’t it make absolute sense to use the most effective parts of gamification to encourage people to live healthy lives – to eat more healthily, to take exercise, to keep their weight at a healthy level, to reduce anxiety, to ‘play’ their way out of depressive thoughts, to overcome a phobia, to beat those OCD habits, etc. But is that a reality?

“Gaming to Engage the Healthcare Consumer”, published by ICF International defines gamification as “the application of game elements and digital game design techniques to everyday problems such as business dilemmas and social challenges”. They cite the Gartner report, “Gamification: Engagement Strategies for Business and IT”, that by 2015, 50 percent of organizations will be using gamification of some kind, and, in 2016, businesses will spend $2.6 billion on gamification.

The ICF report suggests that the trend towards value-based care, the increasing role of the patient as consumer, and the millennial generation as desirable health insurance customers are driving healthcare organizations to look at gamification. And this is all made possible by the huge number of smartphones and tablets that potential gamers own.

However, the Gartner report’s headline figure was that 80 percent of current gamified applications will fail to meet business objectives primarily due to poor design. They go on to say that: “While game mechanics such as points and badges are the hallmarks of gamification, the real challenge is to design player-centric applications that focus on the motivations and rewards that truly engage players more fully. Game mechanics like points, badges, and leader boards are simply the tools that implement the underlying engagement models.” Keeping players engaged, what they call “stickiness” in the trade, is a big challenge for any company gamifying health.

So, what healthy games are available? According to “From Fitbit to Fitocracy: The Rise of Health Care Gamification” at https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/from-fitbit-to-fitocracy-the-rise-of-health-care-gamification/, UnitedHealth Group has OptumizeMe, an app that lets users engage in fitness-related contests with their friends. They’re also testing Join For Me, an app encouraging obese teenagers at risk of developing diabetes to play video games that require dancing or other physical activities. MeYou Health has a rewards program for people who complete one health-related task per day.

GymPact uses GPS to track its users to the gym. Members meeting their workout goals win cash, which comes from people paying penalties for failing to exercise as promised. Fitbit has wireless tracking devices that sync to smartphones and computers, allowing users to track their fitness activities. Fitocracy is a social network, where people track their workouts, challenge friends to exercise contests, and earn recognition for meeting goals. SuperBetter Labs is beta testing an online social game designed to help people coping with illnesses, injuries, or depression.

Tom Chivers’ blog at http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/tomchiversscience/100274676/the-apps-that-will-save-your-life-or-not lists Runkeeper, Nike Run, and Fitocracy as apps that reward you for taking exercise, with extra points for the numbers of steps taken. There’s DietBet and Skinnyo for weight-loss and calorie counting. Sleep Cycle encourages you to get more and better sleep. He suggests that there are apps to make a game of physiotherapy, apps for people with autism, for people with dyslexia, even for pain management for burns. The NHS in the UK has a BMI calculator app.

And that’s pretty much where we are now. Everyone thinks gamification is a great idea to make mundane activities more fun. But, and this is a big ‘but’, just saying something is gamified doesn’t mean that people will come back and use it again and again. We’ve all got apps on our phones and tablets that seemed like a good idea to download when we downloaded them, and they haven’t been used much since that time. A good games app has to engage people. In addition, people have to get some value out of it, such as better health. It would be nice to think that after using the app people have learned something or modified their behaviour in a positive way. Finding programmers who can make this happen is also a challenge.

If only Angry Birds helped you lose weight, cut down on your alcohol consumption, and take more exercise! But if someone finds a way to achieve that, they are on to a winner that we’ll all benefit from.

Enterprise Social Networking

Enterprise Social Networks are identifiable by the fact that they integrate with existing platforms and applications and they appeal directly to end users. In effect, they bring the benefits of social media to the enterprise. So how would you recognize an Enterprise Social Networking (ESN) product? It would be something like Microsoft’s Yammer, Jive Software’s Jive, Salesforce’s Chatter, and IBM’s Connections. In fact, those are Gartner’s four leading products in the sector (Gartner Inc “Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace” by Nikos Drakos et al, September 2013).

Drakos and colleagues estimated the market will be worth $1.4 billion in revenue by 2016, and described it as “dynamic and highly competitive”. Gartner looked at the top 20 vendors in the sector. Apart from the top four mentioned above, Gartner’s Visionaries were: Google, Telligent (Zimbra), SAP, Cisco, and Acquia. The Niche players were: OpenText, Huddle, blueKiwi, Igloo, Novell, Liferay, and Zyncro. And the Challengers were: Tibco Software, VMware, NewsGator, and Atlassian.

According to Gartner, “Leaders are well-established vendors with widely used social software and collaboration offerings. They have established their leadership through early recognition of users’ needs, continuous innovation, overall market presence, and success in delivering user-friendly and solution-focused suites with broad capabilities”.

If you’re thinking of getting an Enterprise Social Network, what are you going to use it for? “S.O.C.I.A.L. – Emergent Enterprise Social Networking Use Cases: A Multi Case Study Comparison”, by Kai Riemer and Alexander Richter (2012), analysed nearly 7500 messages from across five mature networks and found that virtually all the messages could be grouped into one of eleven generic categories. They were:

• Problem solving – what can I do with x that I can’t do with y?
• Idea generation – how we can make this group more useful to its members?
• Status updates – I’m in my weekly meeting with customers
• Work coordination – @bob Can you raise tom’s permissions
• Information storage – checklist for H&S
• Discussion and opinions
• Input generation – #NHF recommends
• Meeting organization – I can’t make that time, can we shift to 4pm?
• Event notifications – 19 May for leaving drinks.
• Social praise – thanks for all your hard work on cut-over day.
• Informal talk – congratulations on your new baby.

Gartner has suggested that the business objectives of Enterprise Social Networking projects are to:

• Improve general communication and information sharing
• Boost team productivity and effectiveness with projects and business processes
• Support communities that stimulate learning and innovation, diffuse best practices, and encourage peer-to-peer networking that strengthens professional and interpersonal relationships.

So let’s take a brief look at those market leaders.

Yammer was launched in 2008 and was bought by Microsoft in 2012. The plans seem to be that it will tightly integrate with Office, SharePoint, and application programs running on Windows. Yammer lives in the cloud and looks pretty much like Facebook, so users can find their way round it fairly easily. With Office 365, sites can run their Microsoft infrastructure in the cloud too.

Jive Software’s Jive was previously known as Clearspace, then Jive SBS, then Jive Engage. Jive (the company) was founded in 2001. Salesforce.com was founded in 1999, and provides a variety of different services to its customer base. Both offer a Facebook-like product.

IBM’s product is IBM Connections. It was announced at Lotusphere in 2007, and is currently at Version 4.5. Its components include a homepage, microblogging, profiles, communities, ideation (the ability to crowdsource ideas), media gallery, blogs, bookmarks, activities (a tool for groups of people to work together on a specific project or task), files, wikis, forums, and a search facility.

The ten IBM Connections components are J2EE (Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition) applications that are hosted on IBM WebSphere Application Server. In this way, the components can be hosted independently of each other, and large-scale deployments can be supported.

Importantly, if this is going to get any take up outside of IBM-controlled environments, IBM Connections uses plug-ins to integrate into existing applications, including:

• IBM Notes
• IBM Sametime
• Microsoft Office
• Microsoft Outlook
• Microsoft Windows Explorer
• Microsoft Sharepoint
• RIM BlackBerry
• Apple iPhone / iPad / iPod Touch
• Google Android Phones
• WebSphere Portal.

There’s also platform support for IBM WebSphere Application Server V8 and DB2 10, as well as support for the IBM i operating system.

It’s likely that once people start to use them, Enterprise Social Networks will take on a life of their own and new uses will be found for them. My feeling is that their use will continue to grow and you’ll begin to find them embedded in every organization that you visit – and you’ll find people checking them on their smartphones and tablets when they’re out and about.

What is Software Defined Anything?

If you’ve sat through a training seminar recently, you’ve probably seen a slide talking about software-defined anything or software-defined everything. Or you may have seen the acronym SDx and wondered what it is and where it’s come from. So let’s have a look at what they’re talking about.

Basically, what we’re looking at is using software to control different kinds of hardware, and then to make that software able to control multiple-component hardware systems. With the growth of the Internet of Things (IoT), it makes sense to start thinking about being able to create rules that are implemented in software that can be used to control a myriad of different types of devices.

At the moment there are a number areas using software-defined technology. For example there’s Software-Defined Storage (SDS), which seems to apply to all sorts of storage software, particularly virtualization software. Different vendors use the term loosely for different things. Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is where network devices are programmable and so networks themselves are more dynamic. Again, it’s a term that’s used by different vendors for different things.

Software-Defined Storage Networks (SDSN) is an attempt to virtualize storage networks by separating the actual physical network from its controlling software. A Software-Defined Hypervisor (SDH) seems to refer to virtualizing the hypervisor layer and separating it from its management console. And finally, there’s Software-Defined Infrastructure (SDI) aka Software-Defined Data Centre (SDDC), which is an aspirational concept where data centre services are controlled by policy-driven software.

Two things probably leap to mind about now. Firstly, this seems a lot like marketecture! We’ve seen this before, where vendors are really selling us an idea of something rather than it being a tangible reality. We are very much in the early days of this sort of thing. The second thing is that this is not directly linked to mainframes. This is VMware’s ideas – as well as a huge number of other companies.

Having said that, of course, the newer hybrid mainframes from IBM will be able to make use of this technology as it becomes available in reality. Also, Gartner reckons that SDx is one of the major disruptive technologies to watch. It makes it easier to scale up existing architecture and even try out different architectures. Also it makes it possible to tune networks, matching network performance to workloads. And, of course the main selling points are flexibility, agility, security, and price.

IBM’s Smarter Computing blog has an interesting blog by Shamin Hossain called “Software defined everything: When a data center becomes soft”, which can be found at http://www.smartercomputingblog.com/software-defined-environment-2/software-defined-everything/.

Clearly the prefix ‘software-defined’ is one that we’re going to hear a lot more about this year.

Operations management still growing

Gartner has produced figures showing that the Worldwide IT Operations Management (ITOM) software revenue increased by 8.7 percent last year and totalled $18.3 billion.

Why is this important? Let me suggest that we have been in or around recession since 2008, making most organizations try to cut their spending and try to save as much money as possible until the markets start moving again. Clearly, operations management is too important to be left – making it appear fairly central to the sucess (or perhaps survival) of many organizations.

Commenting on the figures, Laurie Wurster, Research Director with Gartner said: “The market showed growth for the second consecutive year, after a sharp decline in 2009, despite slow economic growth, tight IT budgets, and merger and acquisition activity. We saw consistent resilience in 2011, with the ITOM software market expanding both in terms of revenue and worldwide markets.”

So which software vendors are benefiting from this growth in the market? Well, it seems there are five that mananged 53.5 percent of the revenue between them. And yet again, in that number one spot is IBM. Second is CA Technologies, at least $1 billion behind the leader. Then comes BMC, Microsoft, and HP.

IBM was in pole position in the combined mainframe management segments, which accounted for 28 percent of its total ITOM software revenue of $3.3 billion.

CA Technologies was in second place for the third year running, with revenue growth ahead of the overall market.

BMC Software enjoyed 8.2 percent growth, with 31 percent of its growth coming from the mainframe. You may wonder whether that makes it a more tastey takeover target!

Microsoft saw impressive growth of 11.2 percent. Most of its sales are associated with its Windows product, of course.

It’ll be interesting to see where HP is next year. The company may be forced to take its eye off the ball as they go to court against Oracle. And then there’s the 25000 jobs that are being cut.

I think the important point to take away from this story is that organizations – whether they’re large mainframe-based sites or Windows sites – are looking to manage their operations in new and developing ways. This must be an indication of their desire to get the world economy moving again, and, more importantly for them, be well placed to take advantage when it is.