Toward a Gamification Model to Improve IT Service Management Quality on Service Desk

Among the different kinds of incident processing centers, the service desk has highlighted with the increasing number of its adopters around the world. Nonetheless, even though it has a series of desirable features and resources, a service desk needs several procedures to survive, without which it can severely suffer with inadequate or inexistent IT service management. In order to overcome this need, the framework of best IT practices, mostly known as ITIL, has been widely implemented on such scenarios. However, its adherence by service desk operators, has not always been as friendly as it should. The main reason for this can be made evident when considering how hard is to comply with so many recommendations laid out on such framework. Additionally, the technical staff attention and worry on complying with that framework is so great that incident treatment quality can be impaired. It is exactly on that challenge, where the persuasive technique named gamification arises here as a proposal to turn hard, tense or tedious tasks, that are commonly performed on this way on service desks, into more interesting and engaging activities in a daily basis. Through game design and elements, gamification can improve the service desk operators´ motivation and engaging, by making them more involved in their job and consequentely optimizing the use and adherence of ITIL recommended IT best practices. In this scenario, since the more IT best practices are adequately followed and the more incident treatment quality increases, obviously the more IT service management quality would be improved.