# Gamification in IT Service Management: A Systematic Mapping Study
## 4 Results
### RQ4. What Is the Effect of Gamifying ITSM Processes?
On the other hand, though the authors concluded that the team was able to learn and operate faster and more effectively with the gamified system, they did not offer information about how they evaluated these aspects. * [P07]: The results of the interviews conducted to the users of the gamified HP Service Manager product showed that most users were willing to record detailed information in incident tickets to help their peers. Besides, users were encouraged to contribute knowledge and to comment the incident articles when the data they registered was useful for other users. The interviewees noticed that the incorporation of gamification and the incentive system in the actual HP Service Manager product had a positive impact and the agents' motivation to perform their tasks greatly improved. In this paper, there is little evidence that gamification has positive effects because the authors have measured the impact considering only the qualitative data extracted from the interviews. Besides, they did not present in the paper the interviews data. * [P12]: Qualitative feedback about the participants' experience in the gamified system for service desk training were collected through an anonymous online survey. The results indicated that the proposed training program was well-received by service desk agents. Most of participants (96%) considered the training system funny and engaging. On the other hand, though the authors noticed that the gamified system has positive impact on the incident response time, they did not demonstrate that the incident response time decreases with the adoption of gamification. * [P13]: [PERSON] and [PERSON] applied their gamification model for gamifying the service desk on a public IT service organization. They conducted an opinion survey to analyze the impact of gamification on the motivation and engagement of the service desk operators. With respect the motivation, the percentage of operators that responded each question value was \"None\" (0%), \"Little\" (22%), \"Moderate\" (22%) and \"Quite\" (56%). Concerning the engagement, the survey responses were \"None\" (0%), \"Little\" (22%), \"Moderate\" (22%) and \"Quite\" (56%). The results of the gamification experiences reported in the primary studies can be useful for detecting the benefits and limitations of the gamification experiments carried out in ITSM, and reveal the positive impact that gamification can have in this field. This information can be useful for ITSM practitioners who plan to gamify their processes to anticipate the different effects of gamification and to highlight the lessons learned from previous experiences. However, given the very small number of published works that report on the empirical evaluation or validation of gamification experiences in the area of ITSM, the study of the impact of gamification included above cannot offer precise and conclusive findings. Besides, the scarce findings are hard to generalize given the small number of experiments conducted in a real organization setting. Consequently, no quantifiable impact on ITSM processes could be reported, impeding the assessment of the effect of gamification beyond the particular claims expressed by the authors in their papers. Furthermore, although the primary studies claim that gamifying ITSM processes had positive effects, in most of them the reported impact is only based on qualitative data obtained from interviews and surveys. Though qualitative data are useful to provide relevant information about the gamified experience, they are susceptible to subjectivity and should be combined with quantitative metrics to obtain more reliable data about the impact of gamification on the ITSM processes. Thus, it is necessary to conduct more empirical studies in this field and measure the impact of gamifying ITSM processes in a more comprehensive way using both qualitative data and quantitative metrics to obtain more reliable results.