Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Rajat Paharia, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Gamification Leader Bunchball (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: From an industry point of view, when you look around at what people are doing or trying to do, what is missing from the landscape?

Rajat Paharia: If you are running a business or are a manager of a business, Facebook, Netflix, and Amazon all probably know more about your employees than you do. It is because they are tracking every single interaction those people have, and they are doing that to make the experience better for the end user and also drive business value for the company. In the consumer space, these guys have figured this out. They have figured out how to take all this activity data and use it to optimize experience and drive business results.

That hasn’t happened in the employee space yet. I think that is a giant white space opportunity for somebody to go in and do that and to say ,“These same employees, who are providing all this value to Amazon, Netflix, and Facebook, are in my system 10, 12, or 14 hours a day, throwing off data in my company.” Right now all that data is being ignored and it is not being used in any interesting way. The same way as there are people now whose entire job it is to analyze the data that is coming out of their various systems and use it to drive business decisions, the same is going to happen in the enterprise. Companies that are going to be able to provide that are going to be hugely valuable. The key thing is that this is inevitable. We are living in an age where we are all throwing off this data. And that data is now available and can be used in interesting ways. Smart companies that have an imperative and an initiative to take that data, and those that use it are going to win.

SM: But that is not necessarily gamification. Amazon has been collecting and using data to sell us stuff for a very long time – and very successfully. It is very fashionable, though. We have been doing this interview series for months now and we have seen interesting companies and perspectives. The truth is, it is not new.

RP: It is not, but they are not motivating any behavior. That is the key difference. Once you eked out every last algorithmic and operation efficiency out of everything you are doing, what do you have left?

SM: If you were to redesign Amazon’s store with gamification in mind, what would you do?

RP: Amazon has indirect and direct revenue drivers. Every time you buy something, that is a direct revenue driver. Indirect is sharing, getting other people into the store by telling people you made a purchase. When we work with companies we start with “What are the business objectives?” That is always number one. It is not about “What mechanics do you put in?” It is “What is the mission statement or the goal you are trying to achieve?” We assume the goal here is to drive revenue, so what are the key performance indicators you are trying to drive? If you are trying to drive direct revenue, what can do to encourage that? You can encourage the depth of spending – can I cross the boundaries of a set of some kind of thing and collect them all? Can I buy one book from each genre or category on Amazon?

SM: The vision you are describing seems forced. I like Amazon the way it is. Maybe that is not the right domain for applying gamification for you. I think earlier examples were more interesting, in particular the examples you were doing with the CRM systems to drive motivation and giving people incentives to update their data in CRM.

RP: It all depends. People care about reputation and people develop reputations on Amazon.

SM: The reviewers get reputation. Somebody who has created a lot of reviews gets a lot of reputation. Oftentimes, from my experience, those reviews are garbage. Just because they are spewing out does not mean they are good reviews.

RP: That is right. That is why you use the community as peers to do that kind of stuff. People don’t earn reputation for spewing out content. They earn reputation when other people like, share, download or utilize their content in an interesting way. There has to be some qualitative metric.

SM: Nowadays there are a lot of useless reviews. My point is that it is not working. The missing thing in social media is the fact that people’s states are different. Somebody who is used to a certain level of service is looking for a review from somebody with comparable travel experience or budgets. If you get a review from someone who is operating at a completely different league, you will get a very mismatched review. It is all context and perspective. In my opinion, this is an unsolved problem out there.

RP: I agree.

SM: Rajat, thank you and good luck with your book tour.

RP: Thank you very much.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Rajat Paharia, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Gamification Leader Bunchball
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