I have written before about how gamification will become an incentive for convergence by tying  all the systems and processes together in the cloud and creating a game-like application environment. One example is a company that is trying to gamify getting out of bed. Actually, not a company so much as a hackathon team.

One of the biggest drivers behind the converged network is the pace of change. Today, the only way to innovate in record time is to have everything connected all the time in a single network. Nowhere are the benefits of a converged paradigm better demonstrated than looking at the outputs of hackathons.

Programmers who participate in hackathons don’t take themselves too seriously, but it is serious business. The word "hackathon" is a combination of the words "hack" and "marathon."   A number of notable companies were started at hackathon events, such as  GroupMe, a 2010 TechCrunch Disrupt hackathon project, which was acquired by Skype for $85 million a year later.

Enterprises now host their own hackathons to improve products and create new features. Google and Facebook are notable examples, with the latter’s iconic “Like” button being developed during such an event. Someday, the term hackathon or something like it will be commonplace in our enterprise vernacular,  as a reference to a “blitz” effort to make some corporate change. These types of initiatives will rely heavily on the converged network, because business process redesign will require real-time access to “big data” stores to change or improve any aspect of a business.