# Gamification in IT Service Management: A Systematic Mapping Study
## 4 Results
### RQ3. How Has Gamification Been Implemented in ITSM Processes?
#### 4.4.5. RQ3.5  
How Long Did the Gamification Experiences Last? How Much Did the Gamification Experiences Cost?  
Table 14 shows the duration of the gamification experiences presented in the studies. The works that introduced theoretical gamification proposals and those that did not provide any information regarding the experience duration are not included in this table.  
As Table 14 shows, references [P03,P04,P11,P12,P14] were the only studies that reported the duration of the gamification experiences. The gamified course about Research Methods of IT Management presented in references [P03,P14] took place during the autumn semester 2013 (15 weeks). In references [P12], the IT service desk agents made the test to validate the Space-Camp training module during the spring semester 2016 (15 weeks). On the other hand, the evaluation of the gamified service desk conducted in [P04] lasted approximately one week, and the test of the gamified service desk presented in reference [P11] around half week.  
The only study that provided any information regarding the cost and time of incorporating gamification in an existing tool was references [P06]. The authors revealed that the total cost of incorporating game elements in a BPM tool for implementing a gamified IT service transition learning approach amounted to only 12 programmer hours. Regarding the time of implementing the game elements in the BPM tool, the authors indicated that seven months were needed to evolve the first version of the gamified software until the final version (first software version: 25 th October 2012 and final software version: 17 th May 2013).  
The data that the studies offer regarding the gamification experiences indicate that experiences were only performed once, and their duration was quite short. Thus, the results obtained are not statistically significant and cannot be generalized. Therefore, their hypotheses cannot be considered proven. On the other hand, in order to evaluate the return of investment, it is necessary to estimate the cost of adopting gamification strategies and the benefits that IT companies would obtain gamifying ITSM processes. Only one of the  
\begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c} \hline \hline
**ID** & **Experience Duration** \\ \hline
[P03] [P14] & 105 days \\
[P04] & 9 days \\
[P11] & 4 days \\
[P12] & 105 days \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table}
Table 14: Cost and duration of gamification experiences.  
Figure 8: Number of primary studies by participants.  
studies analyzed [P06] indicated the development cost of the gamification tool utilized, though it seems too low for the development time reported by the authors. Likewise, the papers that presented gamification experiences do not provide any data about the cost of carrying out such experiences. Besides, none of the studies offered data regarding the economic benefits of adopting gamification in ITSM processes. Thus, in our opinion it is crucial to perform more empirical studies in the area, and collect more credible and generalized evidence for the ITSM community about the cost and the time needed to carry out gamification experiences.