There have been several interesting articles in the past year about the influence of video game design on business software design. The influence is primarily seen in the user interface and in how the software presents the required tasks to the end-user.
In the telecommunications expense management world, new approaches like this are becoming increasingly important. As TEM becomes more common place and the user-base of TEM software users becomes more broad, there will continually be more and more people using TEM software for the first time.
With this growing crowd of inexperienced TEM practitioners, it is more important than ever to consider how easy to understand and learn a TEM system is. Video games are a great place to start. After all, most video games are designed for a wide range of age levels and degrees of technology sophistication. Additionally, they are designed to be as intuitive as possible and easy to learn. This important for video game producers because it would be very hard to sell a video game that took too long to learn.
TEM software is no different, really. Most of the newest users in the TEM software market want to be up and running, saving money, as soon as possible. Look for more and more game inspired features to pop up in TEM software over the coming years.