Gamification in e-Governance: Development of an Online Gamified System to Enhance Government Entities Services Delivery and Promote Public's Awareness M. Alloghani1, A. Hussain1, D. Al-Jumeily1, A. J. Aljaaf1, and J. Mustafina2 1
Faculty of Engineering and Technology, Liverpool John Moores University, UK 2 Kazan Federal University, Kazan, Russia
[email protected]; {A.Hussain, D.Aljumeily}@ljmu.ac.uk; A.J.Kaky@
[email protected];
[email protected]
ABSTRACT Electronic Governance (e-Governance) is the application of the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) with the aim to simplify and support the governance across different parties including public government organizations, business and citizens. Through the adoption and use of Information and Communication technology which will connect all of these three together to support the overall government's processes and operations. It's anticipated that eGovernance shall bring boundless improvements towards strategic planning, proper monitoring of government programs, investments, projects and activities. The eGovernance will provide easy access and delivery of government services to the citizens and reduce associated costs of transactions that occur across government entities. In the recent years, some of the new technological advancement concepts that include Gamification becomes one of the solutions that can be attached with the e-Governance implementation to sustain the effective adoption of government services delivery. Gamification is an evolution that supports people interactions with implemented government electronic services. It can be widely used within public organizations for training of new hires at workplaces, help employees to perform certain tasks and carry their dayto-day activities more efficiently by using Gamification tools which government entities has to offer in order to facilitate eGovernance implementation and services adoption by publics. The developed mobile application is based on a Gamification platform for employees at public government organizations for the purpose of training and learning. In this research, different variables were measured including productivity, motivational engagement, performance, training, support and services, collaboration, innovation, skills development, personal development and behavior changes. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from
[email protected]. ICIET '17, January 10-12, 2017, Tokyo, Japan © 2017 ACM. ISBN 978-1-4503-4803-4/17/01…$15.00
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3029387.3029388
CCS Concept Information systems →Online shopping
Keywords ICT; Gamification; e-Governance; G2C, SOA
1. INTRODUCTION Electronic services and information delivery is a key task in the e-Governance strategic objectives and often found not an easy task to achieve. It's the responsibility of the governments to keep their citizens well informed of the ongoing developments and operations that occur around them. Some of the basic keystones of e-Governance is timely information delivery, quality of services, fast responses and accountability. E-Governance has two different strategic objectives that include external and internal. The external objectives meets the publics' requirements on the front office side through making their interactions with online services more accessible and simplified. The internal objectives facilitate government activities and operations to provide accountability, transparency, and productivity, high performance, innovation, developments and support organizations processes more efficiently that will lead to reduce overheads and result in cost savings [1]. According to [2], the eGovernance maturity model that includes the transformation phase in which all government services and systems are integrated and seamlessly offered to publics as Government to Citizens (G2C) to meet the publics needs and expectations. It's imperative for governments to seek for latest progression and advancements on recent technologies that will support implementation of government services and long term citizens' adoption by accommodating the concepts that has been newly emerged such as Gamification that is new tool that helps to engage and motivate users to adopt the government systems and services. The Gamification uses the elements of game design into contexts of non-games [3].
2. LITERATURE REVIEW “Gamification is a valuable technique in the workplace because it leverages what game designers and psychologists have learned about what motivates people — things like feedback and wellstructured challenges,” [4]. On the other hand, Mobile applications that utilize elements of games can help citizens to reshape their life and encourage good behavioral changes and attitudes towards implemented services [5]. Gamification stereotypically uses challenges and rivalry instinct to encourage collaborative, productive and supportive behavioral changes. According to [6] who claimed the initial emergence of the Gamification concept was in 2008 that has been embraced by
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the media sector, but become more pervasive afterwards. The core concept of Gamification was widely used in the early era of teaching and learning process, with a silver or gold star label just next to a student's name as a motivational technique. It's necessary to understand educational and training Gamification not to be confused with the traditional serious games, game-based simulators as these focus on creating game-like experiences that convey an educational value. The educational and training-based Gamification seek to add game-like concepts to the vocational and learning process [6]. If Gamification can lead to enhance the productivity, performance, developments and implementation of corporate public government organizations then it has to be integrated into the end-users training and vocational process which means it has to be included in the organizations core business process and work flow. The public organizations should incorporate the Gamification concept into every part of internal process and procedures as superior add-on not just as temporal solution that goes along with the strategic objectives of e-Governance implementation across various organizations. Gamification can “offer personalized onboarding guides and messaging targeting specific user-groups and individual users gives employees the opportunity to learn your industry, culture, and new skills in a manner that is both entertaining and fine-tuned to their learning style. This in turn, helps employees gain a better grasp of their role within the company while also promoting a positive first impression, increasing both motivation and loyalty,” [7]. The government organizations have always endeavored to be recognized by publics through fulfillment of their needs and expectations. They promote excellence throughout every corporate department by building mutual strategic relationship employees and outside users. For the government organizations to keep up their progress on outstanding services delivery to the publics, it is essential to take care of internal process enhancements that include professional identity of employees. One of the most remarkable advantages of gamifying the government organizations' endusers vocational education and training is that it breaks everything down into small-sized pieces. The scores, badges, awards and prizes help to set the work scope and time phases. For citizens who access the government services to perform certain transaction activities are sometimes easier to manage when they have an end point to look forward to. Similarly, taking the example of new hires at public organizations who undertake a new job where they realize the experience of being put back in the trainees program. One of the major challenges which faces e-Governance implementation is not having the publics involved in the decision making process which lead to less adoption of implemented services. Furthermore, creating a knowledgeable, engaged publics, motivated employees, engaged workforce, improved performance, enhanced business process and personal developments all of which require to adopt new technological engagement platforms that integrate Gamification with organizations' existing systems to satisfy these aspects. The Gamification applications will be used for onboard new hires, making employees their job easily with introductory missions, encourage publics to know the recent implemented government services and be able to receive prompt feedback to driver better satisfaction and performance. Consequently, the Gamification of education, learning and training provides
added values and advantages to government organizations where employees gets feedback on provisioning better performance, line managers will get the details they require to optimize planning of strategies for better business outcomes and results, top management and executives shall gain perceptions into the organizations' services delivery and be able to form competitive advantages amongst other public entities [8].
3. GAMIFICATION IN E-GOVERNANCE The recent theoretical and empirical scientific researches have showed the potentials which Gamification can bring to societies where it can possibly attract publics' attention and engaging them to perform their activities with high quality and efficiency [6] [9] [10]. The government officials can use the Gamification in many areas such as raising the awareness levels amongst the organization employees, different departments and assess unrecognized government services initiatives. The Australian Bureau of Statistics wanted to make people adopt the government initiatives and applied Gamification by building a gamified application that allows players to build towns and act like a mayor of the city they build and make any decision using the census data which contain demographics, educational backgrounds, employment state, income, ownership of home and transportations information. Through the use of Gamification, the government was able to encourage citizens to adopt services and transactions related to the Australian Bureau of Statistics and help to leverage awareness levels of the significance of census among people. Gamification can be applied across many government entities for changing the employees' attitudes and behavior. For example, an organization may notice the obesity rates increased among employees and they are hoping to keep their employees fit by generating some competitions among them and improve their workplace environment and increase overall productivity. So the Gamification can create this unique environment that encourages people to compete in order to win prizes or receive badges as part of a game and through the process they receive training, learning and education as something new or behave differently in an anticipated manner [11].
4. GAMIFIED APPLICATION DESIGN The primary reason for this research was to study, analyze and develop a gamified application that serves the need of the governments to facilitate the e-Governance among other solutions the Gamification as new recent emerged concept was chosen to meet this requirement. The gamification can be applied across a wide-ranging spectrum of conditions where citizens, employees and business need to be motivated or encouraged to perform some actions and drive their participation by integrating some of the game elements. Currently many nongovernment entities especially those from the private sector have witnessed significant results via integrating game elements into their business process. The issue is that achieved results are not checked against evaluation metrics or statistical tests and can't be verified. In this paper, the proposed gamified application is tested for its applicability and measured for users' acceptance levels. The mechanics elements were used as tools to yield the responses from the players. The elements used include namely, scores, rounds, badges, leaderboards, achievements, challenges, onboarding, social engagement and gifting [12].
5. REQUIREMENTS SPECIFICATIONS One of the good strategies to implement successful gamified application is to have a clear business objectives [12] and hence
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a number of objectives were formed to be achieved which include increasing the levels of productivity among employees, motivational engagement, increase performance, enable training, support and services, raise the levels of collaboration between different departments and teams, encourage government entities for innovation, skills development, personal development and behavior changes. The target players include citizens, employees and even business who can use this application as a tool for learning, training and education purposes. Government entities may use it to engage citizens in tailoring the e-Governance initiatives, evaluate the government services and accommodate their needs that should be considered to achieve targeted objectives and meet the overall government strategic goals. Furthermore, government entities will be able to retain new onboard employees and raise their competency levels, knowledge and help them to attain vocational skills and achieve professional identity across the organization.
To incentive the system's users to take part of this application, a gamified set of actions has been defined with labeled boxes indicating the progression levels. According to [13] to encourage users' performance, motivation and collaboration, the rewards or badges attainment should be done through achievable efforts where users should undertake specific action to complete in order to advance to next level or get better rank among the rest of users.
6. PROPOSED ARCHITECTURE The model-driven CASE tool through WebRatio 5 that is integrated in the IDE of Eclipse has been utilized for the proposed online gamified system. All design's elements which include models and components that are stored in the IDE workspace of Eclipse. The application designed by the WebRatio works well with Java and can be deployed on any application server such as Oracle WebLogic, IBM WebSphere and Apache Tomcat. The application is built in a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) environment that can collaborate with any legacy systems across the government organizations. The WebRatio uses libraries that can be connected to any repository including MySQL, Oracle and MS SQL Server. To manage the elements of proposed game mechanics, the data model was proposed based on the Gamification principles and below figure which illustrates a high level abstraction of application data model:
Figure 2 Leaderboards of Gamified Application Figure 2 depicts the badge titles which include gold, silver and bronze with score needed that can be found on the user admin console. The system incorporated modules where they consist of a set of factors that include productivity, motivational engagement, performance, training, support and services, collaboration, innovation, skills development, personal development and behavior changes. For instance, the personal development module has a sub module with a set of questions linked with number of actions that a user must achieve before obtaining an award or badge. Each of these module show a status that is displayed perceptually via the progress bar in relation with the highest scored points. The sum of all scored points correspond to the credits that converted into virtual rewards that mainly stimulate users to meet all incorporated system' modules requirements. On the other hand, the application has two major components which include dashboard and ranking. Ranking is very important especially to government entities, schools and universities who always like to be on top but never at the bottom of the rank and will encourage its users to contribute more to enlarge the visibility of the organization across the society. The system allow users to benefit from the use of geolocation-based field filter. This enables users to view the rank of a particular business company or a government entity within a filtered geographical area as a desirable option.
7. SYSTEM EVALUATION 7.1 Purpose Figure 1 Data Model of Gamified Application Figure 1 shows the data model representation of gamified application. The user table stores all end-user information such as biographical details, name, contribution, reputation and all points scored that include participation with most acquired badges. The action instance records all end-users' (employees, citizens, etc.) activities accomplished with logged date and time. Each instance is connected with the type table identifier. The badge instance is a gathering point of all awards assigned by government entities towards specific objectives or goals and recorded with date and time of attainment.
Following the realization of the gamified system design and development and prior to move this system to production environment where all users can start accessing it, an evaluation of the proposed system decided to check the effectiveness of incorporated gamification mechanics and ensure overall system's stability and investigate users' gamification acceptance.
7.2 Method The proposed gamified system was developed as online web application to enable vast accessibility by different users. Besides the main objective of this proposed system to sustain its usage across various government entities, most participants were employees who were asked to voluntarily participate in the experiment. We let users test the gamified system and then
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asked them to complete an online questionnaire. The online questionnaire logged all participants' answers and we used the results for system's evaluation. The sample size was 613, around 3 participants did not fully complete the questionnaire and 10 withdrawn from online questionnaire. Based on the logged results obtained through the online questionnaire, the proposed gamified system was evaluated for its acceptance by participants. The quantitative method using online survey questionnaire made it easy to collect the data in a short period.
Table 1 Distribution of Professional Level Frequency
Percent
Leaders
44
7.4
Supervisory
89
14.8
Consultants and Experts
22
3.7
Professional and Technical
294
49.1
7.3 Results
Administrative
111
18.5
From the analyzed results, we observed high scores from the overall participated users with positive responses on the tested gamified system.
Supporting Jobs
39
6.5
600
100.0
Total
Table 1 shows distribution of professional level of participants where most of respondents range from professionals and technicians (49.1%) followed by administrative (18.5%) and supervisory (14.8%).
Figure 3 Distribution of Gender The above Figure 3shows the distribution of gender about 67.6% of the respondents were male and 32.4% were female.
Figure 6 Distribution of General Satisfaction Above Figure 6 shows the distribution of overall participants' acceptance, the majority (75.0%) of the respondents have strongly agree and further 22.2% accepted the system. Only 0.9% of the respondents showed dissatisfaction with the gamification in general. Table 2 Descriptive Statistics of System's Acceptance Level Figure 4 Distribution of Nationality Figure 4 shows the distribution of nationality where 24% of the respondents were local and 76% of the samples were expats.
62.0
6.25
91.8
40 - 65
13.4
15.0
1.98
89.3
7 - 15
14.4
15.0
1.48
95.9
8 - 15
33.4
35.0
3.10
95.5
20 - 35
43.2
46.5
7.77
86.5
17 - 50
8.6
10.0
1.90
86.5
2 - 10
17.7
19.0
3.10
88.4
4 - 20
39.6
42.5
6.31
87.9
18 - 45
43.9
47.0
7.99
87.8
11 - 50
Productivity
44.4
47.0
Motivation
59.7
Performance Training &
services Collaboration Ideation &
Figure 5 indicates the distribution of different educational levels where 52.8% of the respondents had bachelors and nearly 9.3% possessed masters. Around 25.0% of the samples had a high school or less than high school while 12.1% have diploma or higher diploma. Only one respondent was qualified PhD.
19 - 50
SD
learning Support &
Figure 5 Distribution of Educational Level
6.69
Mean % 88.8
Mean Median
Innovation Skills development Personal Development Behavioral Changes
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Range
Table 2 shows summary statistics, key variables used in this research. The descriptive statistics as depicted from the above table shows the obtained results of surveyed sample size of 600 participants and describes the obtained values of mean, median, standard deviation, mean percentage and range for level of acceptance. The level of acceptance is higher in motivational and engagement followed by productivity and behavioral changes. The acceptance level is comparatively lower in ideation and innovation.
8. CONCLUSION In this research, an approach to use the gamification for enhancing government entities was introduced. More specifically, an online gamified system proposed and developed as a mean to support the implementation and enhancements of government entities services delivery. The proposed gamified system was designed for general users among all public entities. The system has been evaluated for its applicability and stability using quantitative method through survey questionnaire. As a future work, it's planned to modify the beta version and customize it with adding additional scope to include more mechanic elements and introduce integrations architecture for other responsive online platforms. Furthermore, approaching different government entities and apply it specifically on certain entities and evaluate the system and compare the results using data obtained from this study with the upcoming planned version to see the level of improvements and all variables that might have more impact over other variables.
9. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT The authors are deeply grateful and would like to acknowledge the government entities' employees from government entities and institutions who participated in this study. Figure 7 Correlation between Productivity & Motivation The correlation analysis technique has been applied to show the relationship among the studied variables. To measure the strength of the linear relationship between two variables in a scatterplot, the correlation coefficient determined denoted by r. Figure 7 shows the correlation is significant at 0.01 level. For the illustration purposes, the productivity, motivation and engagement variables were selected and in terms of the relationship and direction, the above figure shows a correlation of nearly +1 with a nearly perfect uphill straight line.
10. REFERENCES [1] ITU, "E-Governance and Developing Countries," 2008. [Online] Available: https://www.itu.int/ITU-D [2] A Fath-Allah, L. Cheikhi, Rafa E., Al-Qutaish, and A. Idri, "E-government maturity models: a comparative study," International Journal of Software Engineering & Apps. Vol.5, No.3, 2014. [3] S. Deterding, D. Dixon, R. Khaled, L. Nacke, “From game design elements to gamefulness: defining "gamification”, Proceedings of the 15th International Academic MindTrek Conference: Envisioning Future, 2011. [4] M. Delaney, "How Gamification Helps Local Governments Engage Employees and Citizens, 2013. [Online] Available: http://www.statetechmagazine.com2013/09/ [5] X.-t. Guo et al., "Understanding the acceptance of mobile health services: A Service participant's analysis, Management Science and Engineering," Int. Conference, pp. 1868 -1873, 2012.
Figure 8 Correlation between Productivity & Personal Dev. The above figure shows correlation coefficient of studied variables that include productivity and personal development with a moderate uphill relationship of 0.671. When comparing the two figures, Figure 7 illustrated a perfect positive linear relationship while Figure 8 shows moderate yet positive uphill straight line. It's noticed in Figure 8 that points are scattered in a wider band with demonstration of relationship but not as Figure 7. The rest of variables indicated similar values but not +0.50 that indicate moderate positive relationship.
[6] Deterding, S. et al., "Gamification: Using Game-design Elements in Nongaming Contexts. In CHI '11 Extended Abst. on Human Factors in Computing Sys., NY, 24252428. [7] Yoav Vilner, "Gamified' Employee Training Works Brilliantly but Is Loved Little," 2015. [Online] Available: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/249244 [8] Bunchball, Gamification for Training, Learning and Employee Development," 2016. [Online] Available: http://www.bunchball.com/solutions/ [9] Chourney, A., "Taking the Game Out Of Gamification," Dalhousie Journal of Interdisciplinary Management, 2012.
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[10] Groh, F., "Gamification: State of the Art Definition and Utilization," 4th Seminar on RTMI, 2012. [11] J. Chambers, "Gamification: When governments up their game," 2015. [Online] Available: http://www.civilserviceworld.com/articles/feature/ [12] L. Stagliano, "Designing Enterprise Gamification Architectures," 2013. [Online] Available: https://www.politesi.polimi.it/bitstream/10589 [13] Glover, I., Campbell, A., Latif, F., Norris, L., Toner, J., & Tse, C. "A Tale of One City: Intra-institutional Variations in Migrating VLE Platform," Research in Learning Technology, 2012.
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