When it comes to data, one question we should always ask is: if it isn’t important, why do we bother recording it?
The implication being that we are recording it so it must be important, but why? Probably because of operational integrity, performance analysis, compliance returns and/or legal duty or defence.
Data quality and governance are both important but very different. Data governance is about access, purpose and longevity, while data quality is about making sure those criteria are met.
What is gamification?
Gamification can be defined as rewards with little or no intrinsic value, used to reinforce desired behaviours and actions.
In 1983 NatWest Bank introduced a new children’s savings product. On opening your account, you received a small piggy bank (Woody). When you hit certain savings targets, NatWest would give you another larger piggy bank. If you managed to save a massive £100 (in those days, my pocket money was 50p per week), you would get the whole family.
Each piggy bank probably cost NatWest a couple of pounds but the acquisition of young customers was almost priceless; many of my friends are still with NatWest almost 50 years later.
Gamification doesn’t mean making the work appear trivial or childish. It’s a strategy to engage people with a pretty dry topic by providing visibility of progress and fostering competition and collaboration.
My examples below (sorry, I’m a bit of a geek) are taken from gaming arcades in the 1980s, Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) and mobile games such as Wordle, but all can be applied to real-world situations.
Keeping score
As a child, I spent far too much time in the arcades, concentrating my limited resources (mainly money and skills) on particular machines to continually improve. The mechanism for this was your score awarded for achieving small objectives, such as defeating a wave of alien ships or repeating a specific pattern of button presses). These small wins accumulated into total score. Likewise, in D&D you earned experience points (XP) for avoiding traps or defeating monsters in battle.
You need to make visible the catalogue of data-quality problems and give credit for avoiding a DQ problem (e.g. improving the percentage of good records) or for addressing problems once they’ve been identified. The individual points need to be aggregated to show a total score, with either a reset or a rolling window so that newcomers aren’t disadvantaged.
Leader boards
Most arcade machines have a top 10 leaderboard where you can enter all three of your initials and be immortalised in gaming lore, or at least until the arcade closed at 11pm and they turned the machines off.
As well as your personal DQ score, a publicly-available leaderboard (within the organisation) provides colleagues with an incentive to push hard on their own and their team’s DQ metrics. If this can also be included in performance reviews, this further raises the status of data quality.
Streaks
In the arcade, neutralising multiple enemies without a miss saw a ‘points multiplier’, and these days, Duo Lingo and Wordle (for example) track how many days in a row you’ve played. The longer the streak, the greater the incentive to maintain it. As with many things in life, consistency in DQ pays dividends.
Badges & rewards
Continuing the arcade theme, when you hit 10,000 points you would be rewarded with, say, an extra ship, and in D&D, once you had enough XP, your character would be able to use better weapons or spells. Your personal score is important to you but the chances are no one else cares (apart from perhaps your fellow gaming geeks).
If you reward DQ performance or successes with public recognition (perhaps a badge against their personal icon in Teams) or small awards (DQ champion of the week, restaurant vouchers or Starbucks for their team), this all helps to drive engagement.
Levelling up
In D&D, when you gain sufficient XP, your personal attributes (such as wisdom, stamina and strength) increase.
Likewise, when colleagues reach a DQ milestone, they should be promoted – perhaps DQ cadet, tactician, pilot, flight lieutenant, squadron leader and wing commander? Each of these brings rewards in terms of access or influence.
Quests & missions
Many games have an end-of-level ‘boss’ character who can’t be defeated in a single attack, and to do so requires experience, planning, strategy and execution. In D&D, there is an overall quest (Destroy the Ring) and side missions (Battle for Helm’s Deep), and Candy Crush has ‘races’ lasting for 48 hours between you and four other players. Anyone with young teenagers has probably been forced to endure ‘Yellow Mini Punch’ on long journeys (IYKYK).
In DQ, these can become quests to identify new problems so celebrate these as wins rather than as failures. Missions can become a project to address problems such as preventing new instances of DQ errors and correcting existing ones. You could award ‘mission achieved’ stickers for laptops or ‘successful quest’ mugs for those involved.
Tribes & rivals
Bringing colleagues together for a single purpose will produce higher performances. You never undertake a D&D quest on your own; there is always a tribe (The Brotherhood of the Ring). You also need to be able to benchmark performance and have a reason to excel, so healthy rivalry between tribes is also important.
The risk of being gamed
All of these strategies can be important to engage your wider organisation with fixing data but these incentives can backfire if you aren’t careful.
We want to encourage DQ prevention and fixes at the earliest opportunities – there shouldn’t be any benefit in creating a DQ problem just to fix it or if there are five DQ problems, fixing one a day in order to spread out the ‘streak’. The rewards for immediate action must always outweigh the rewards for delay.
The tragedy of the commons
You can use the ‘tragedy of the commons’ economic theory to your advantage. This is where there’s a shared resource (in this case, a pool of DQ problems) and you can gain a personal, short-term advantage by using more of the resource than you are entitled to but at the expense of depleting the overall shared resource, but if you don’t take a short-term advantage, someone else will and you will be worse off. Any outstanding DQ problem therefore should be discoverable and fixable by more than one person or team so that there’s no incentive to delay action; if you don’t do it, someone else will and they’ll get the credit.
Aaron Reese is a director of Overwatch Solutions.
