I’m a huge fan of ‘Reward & recognition systems‘ for Social Business platforms – tools that encourage positive behaviours, reward users for contribution and dramatically increase engagement and adoption.
[Some may call them ‘gamification’ but I really can’t relate to that name, neither can many business executives I meet.]
There are many such solutions out there, with more coming to the IBM Connections and Jive platforms every month.
However, in my opinion, the first to market for Connections is also still the best available. Kudos Badges from ISW set the bar in terms of providing a wide set of functionality, a large number of default out-of-the-box badges, management within Connections itself, on-premise install, the ability to integrate with non-Connections systems, and a really extensible customisation toolset.
In addition, Adam and the team at ISW are keeping their foot on the gas in terms of improving the product month-on-month. Since Lotusphere we’ve seen the addition of community leaderboards, many new metrics, the addition of filters and much more. Even better, they are proving to be excellent at supporting customers that use the tool.
As the first partner for Kudos Badges, Collaboration Matters have deployed Kudos Badges on more than a dozen environments now, and have been seriously impressed with the way that ISW have listened to customers’ needs and then very quickly extended the product to provide the functionality required. An example of this is at a large consultancy organisation that we work with, where a community needed badges that would be awarded only for contribution to that one specific community. Within a week, ISW had shipped us additional code that would allow this ability and the details on how to create the badges that the community desired.
Just last week, ISW shipped the latest greatest release of Kudos Badges, 1.4. Among many other enhancements, Kudos Badges 1.4 brings in the idea of Thanks – the ability to send a message and a badge to a colleague to thank them for doing great work. This screenshot and video shows this functionality really well:
We are already seeing and hearing great reactions from Connections users to the addition of Kudos Thanks. It seems to hit a real need to add a lasting recognition to someone’s profile to mark them as having achieved or contributed in a really significant way. If you haven’t seen it in action do check out the video above, or contact me to receive an invite to our own Connections and Kudos Badge demo environment.
Lastly, I do want to say a massive ‘Thanks’ and ‘Kudos’ to ISW for their continued efforts on this product and their commitment to the IBM Social Business community. Great work, guys.
