Inspired by the engaging effects in video games, gamification aims at motivating people to show desired behaviors in a variety of contexts. During the last years, gamification influenced the design of many software applications in the consumer as well as enterprise domain. In some cases, even whole businesses, such as Foursquare, owe their success to well-designed gamification mechanisms in their product. Gamification also attracted the interest of academics from fields, such as human-computer interaction, marketing, psychology, and software engineering. Scientific contributions comprise psychological theories and models to better understand the mechanisms behind successful gamification, case studies that measure the psychological and behavioral outcomes of gamification, methodologies for gamification projects, and technical concepts for platforms that support implementing gamification in an efficient manner. Given a new project, gamification experts can leverage the existing body of knowledge to reuse previous, or derive new gamification ideas. However, there is no one size fits all approach for creating engaging gamification designs. Gamification success always depends on a wide variety of factors defined by the characteristics of the audience, the gamified application, and the chosen gamification design. In contrast to researchers, gamification experts in the industry rarely have the necessary skills and resources to assess the success of their gamification design systematically. Therefore, it is essential to provide them with suitable support mechanisms, which help to assess and improve gamification designs continuously. Providing suitable and efficient gamification analytics support is the ultimate goal of this thesis. This work presents a study with gamification experts that identifies relevant requirements in the context of gamification analytics. Given the identified requirements and earlier work in the analytics domain, this thesis then derives a set of gamification analytics-related activities and uses them to extend an existing process model for gamification projects. The resulting model can be used by experts to plan and execute their gamification projects with analytics in mind. Next, this work identifies existing tools and assesses them with regards to their applicability in gamification projects. The results can help experts to make objective technology decisions. However, they also show that most tools have significant gaps towards the identified user requirements. Consequently, a technical concept for a suitable realization of gamification analytics is derived. It describes a loosely coupled analytics service that helps gamification experts to seamlessly collect and analyze gamification-related data while minimizing dependencies to IT experts. The concept is evaluated successfully via the implementation of a prototype and application in two real-world gamification projects. The results show that the presented gamification analytics concept is technically feasible, applicable to actual projects, and also valuable for the systematic monitoring of gamification success.

Process modelling is one of the extensively time consuming tasks within the fieldof process management. This thesis represents an alternative approach minimizing the effort for process modelling based on an intelligent, self-learning system.The current situation of process management in practise is the starting point forthe definition of the requirements which an appropriate information system architecture has to fulfil to solve the issues of contemporary process modelling. The current situation is described by a combination of theoretical considerations aboutcontemporary process management and a survey estimating the efforts needed tomodel and update process descriptions and diagrams out of several, very different documents. The identified requirements represent the groundwork for the derivation of manda-tory features and the architectural composition of the basic components of an intelligent software system and its integration in a process manager’s work. Moreover the effects of the integration of the defined intelligent software system on the social-technical interactions within organizations are sketched. Because text analysis and the transformation of texts into process diagrams crucially influences efficiency and effectivity in process management appropriate, established technologies are comparatively evaluated and discussed regarding theirability to reduce these efforts. According to the identified advantages and limitations of artificial neural networks within the qualitative comparison of the dif-ferent technologies a new concept was developed to fit the needs more holisticthan the existing concepts. The new concept consists of aspects of different established technologies, biological findings and philosophical thoughts about the impossibility of a physical representation of human mind. It results in a conceptof three-dimensional, spatiotemporal flexible, artificial neural networks, which change themselves permanently. A final qualitative comparison figures out thedifferences between the characteristics of existing concepts of artificial neural networks and determines the improvements and benefits the new concept of neural networks achieves.

Gamification is a novel method to improve engagement, motivation, or participation in non-game contexts using game mechanics. To a large extent, gamification is a psychological- and design-oriented discipline, i.e., a lot of effort has to be spent already in the design phase of a gamification project. Subsequently, the design is implemented in information systems such as portals or enterprise resource planning applications. These systems act as mediators to transport a gameful design to its users. However, the efforts for the subsequent development and integration process are often underestimated. In fact, most conceptual gamification designs are never implemented due to the high development costs that arise from building the gamification solution from scratch, imprecise design or technical requirements, and communication conflicts between different stakeholders in the project. This thesis addresses these problems by systematically defining the phases and stakeholders of the overall gamification process. Furthermore, the thesis rigorously defines the conceptual requirements of gamification based on a broad literature review. The identified conceptual requirements are mapped to a domain-specific language, called the Gamification Modeling Language. Moreover, this thesis analyzes 29 existing gamification solutions that aim to decrease the implementation efforts of gamification. However, using the different language elements, it is shown that none of the existing solutions suffices all requirements. Therefore, a generic and reusable platform as runtime environment for gamification is proposed which fulfills all presented functional and non-functional requirements. As another benefit, it is shown how the Gamification Modeling Language can be automatically compiled into code for the gamification runtime environment and, thus, further reduces development efforts. Based on the developed artifacts and five real gamified applications from industry, it is shown that the efforts for the implementation of the gamification can be significantly reduced from several months or weeks to a few days. Since the technology is designed as a reusable service, future projects benefit continuously with regards to time and efforts.

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