Social Business strategist, podcaster, blogger, founder of Social Connections and conference speaker
I’ve always passionately argued that the content from these global and regional conferences should be shared openly and widely – not just the decks themselves, but also audio and (preferably) video recordings. JiveWorld17 is a fantastic example of this being delivered.
If you’re primarily focused on IBM-based solutions, you may not be aware that I have a Jive-focused blog over at Jive.news.
This is particularly relevant this week as it is JiveWorld, Jive’s annual worldwide conference in Las Vegas. I’m blogging as much of the news as I can from the conference, including today’s posts on yesterday’s key announcements and Jive’s roadmap for 2017 and 2018. Do subscribe to the blog there if you want to receive my Jive posts in the future.
IBM yesterday published a press release previewing the headline features of the upcoming new on-premises release of Connections, Connections 6. I take a look at some of the headline features, and then pick out one specific enhancement that will make a huge difference for community managers!
I really enjoyed this quote from Amy Holt, Vice President of Marketing at Red Thread…
Jive Software bring’s its ‘Power of Connection’ event world tour to London on 1st November, featuring some excellent UK-based customer speakers. Will you attend?
It’s always good to read a successful customer reference story, particularly when the organisation’s culture and productivity has truly been revolutionised by deploying a new internal community.
This is definitely the case with this new case study, featuring UNIQA Insurance Group. Based in Vienna, UNIQA have grown incredibly quickly over the past decade, particularly via a push into Central and Eastern Europe. This has left them with a number of substantial challenges in terms of communications and alignment across these varied markets and native languages:
Jive Software, Inc. today announced that UNIQA Insurance Group AG (UNIQA Group), a leading European insurance group, launched a new Jive-powered Interactive Intranet to strengthen strategic alignment and employee engagement across its global workforce. With this modern corporate communications solution, the rapidly growing company is cultivating a more transparent, unified culture, while gaining a better understanding of the reach and impact of its internal messages.
UNIQA Insurance Group AG (UNIQA Group), a leading European insurance group, launched a new Jive-powered Interactive Intranet to strengthen strategic alignment and employee engagement across its global workforceOver the past fifteen years, UNIQA Group acquired several insurance companies during its push into Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). The business is now one of the leading insurance groups in its core markets of Austria and CEE, serving more than 10 million customers in 19 countries. UNIQA’s 100 percent subsidiary, UNIQA International, manages 15 markets in the CEE growth region-most of which operate with different languages, cultures and other regional distinctions. The company’s international communications team struggled to efficiently deliver announcements and messages to various countries via email, multiple disconnected static intranets and expensive in-person meetings.
“As we expand, we’re striving to be a different kind of insurer. The cornerstone of our operations is companywide personal contact and direct collaboration amongst all employees throughout our countries and local branches,” said Gabriela Rusu, head of group communication at UNIQA. “Jive will bring us a big step forward in this journey by connecting those offices, and facilitating employee engagement and change management. We made the switch to Jive’s Interactive Intranet because we need a secure, cloud-based solution-with both powerful communications and collaboration functionality that save the organization significant time and money.”
The interactive intranet-dubbed “UNIQAspace”-launched this summer to facilitate captivating communications that reach thousands of employees across all of the company’s markets. Underpinned by Jive, the solution makes it easy for executives to interact with employees through blogs and videos. People can ask questions, comment, share and discuss-opening up transparent dialogue between executives and country teams that fosters alignment around the company’s vision. UNIQAspace also provides consumer-style mobile apps with easy ways for employees to get company news, stay connected and participate wherever they go.
I had the pleasure of working with UNIQA on the early stages of this project, and it’s been hugely rewarding to hear how well UNIQAspace has been received by their employees, and to see the transformational shift that is taking place in their international communications, knowledge-sharing and collaboration.
UNIQA are a good example of an organisation that has grown quickly, primarily by acquisition then followed by organic growth, where the existing centrally-published intranet and communications methodology simply hadn’t kept up with the demands of a relatively young, multi-national and multi-lingual workforce. Shifting to a open, transparent and collaborative work style via a cloud-based community has empowered employees, created opportunities for cross-team engagement, and ensured that all countries are representated, heard and understood.
One of the key differentiators between the community solutions developed by Jive Software and those from IBM and Microsoft (talking Sharepoint rather than Yammer) is the relative lack of focus on the requirement for document management.
That’s not to say that Jive platforms do not allow the sharing and management of documents – far from it – but that instead, these are simply embedded within the standard content types and information architecture of the platform rather than treated as a specific pillar of the platform itself.
Just as a user can create a native Jive document or discussion, so they can upload a file (e.g. a Word document) that can be previewed, downloaded, commented on, updated by others and managed from a version perspective. However, these files do not have a hierarchy beyond the place containers they reside within – there’s no concept of folders or libraries for instance. Files are primarily stored within Jive documents (or can be attached to other content types), and are managed using the same tags and categories that apply to all other content.
At the end of the day, in Jive communities, files are just one of the many ways in which users can collaborate. In many situations they are actually discouraged – group and team work can be much more effective when using native content types than when having to deal with the upload/download of sizeable files, the need for compatible editor support and so on.
This differs from IBM Connections in a pretty significant way…
File sharing was added to the IBM Connections product back the 2.5 release in 2009 alongside Wikis (back when it was still badged as Lotus Connections).
Initially, IBM seemed to envisage this support as being intended for lightweight social file sharing – the file management features were limited, meta data was very simplistic and all files were shared at a single level, relying on tags to provide any structure required. Right from the first implementations of Connections 2.5 it was pretty clear that this was not going to be enough for most IBM customers. Whether because users were typically migrating from Lotus Quickr or Domino Team Rooms, or because Connections customers tended to be large enterprises that had become conditioned to heavy use of document and content management platforms, users were adamant that they needed hierarchical storage architectures, heavy-duty file meta-data, complex library permissions and so on.
IBM responded to these demands by steadily adding more features to the Files feature in subsequent Connections releases. From the Windows Explorer connector to allow direct browsing of files from the desktop, through folder support (firstly for standalone files and then within communities), then the addition of industrial-grade Connections Content Manager (CCM) file libraries (built on IBM FileNet), to document editing and preview in IBM Docs and so on. Looking at the Connections portfolio from the outside last year, it seemed as if almost every new Connections feature and enhancement was somehow related to the management of files in the platform! (I’m sure that wasn’t the reality, but that was how it read from the press releases and announcement letters.)
Personally, I find this difficult to comprehend (and I’ve had long and passionate discussions with both IBM product managers and IBM partners about this topic). I find files (particularly Microsoft Office documents) to be fine for point-in-time exports of collaborative content, workflows or decisions, but they are not supportive of productive team or community thinking, discussion or working in a general sense.
There are, of course, situations where files are necessary – for example a creative team working on an image or video that needs to be shared outside the organisation, or a finance team working on a complex report. However, in the vast majority of situations, my personal belief is that the content should be stored in a native form in the best application to support the act of working together around that information, decision or process. For most general knowledge work, that should likely be a native document, question or discussion in the collaborative platform, rather than a proprietary file that then needs to be managed as a separate entity. In addition, I continue to propose that folksonomy almost always beats taxonomy when it comes to collaborative use cases, and therefore that tags and categories are more appropriate ways to manage information than hierarchical folders.
Sadly, but probably inevitably, I seem to be in the minority on this discussion. So many people (particularly those in their 30s and 40s) remain so subconsciously wedded to the concept of their knowledge being stored in a collection of files in a hierarchy of folders, all still named with long-unnecessary legacy three-character file extensions. It’s these folks that are demanding that IBM support this out-dated means of working within Connections, and thus it’s perfectly understandable that IBM is responding by supporting this left-over 1980s paradigm within Connections.
Why the difference between IBM and Jive customer demands?
Interestingly, in my time as a Jive Software strategist, I was rarely asked for similar file management features within Jive-n communities, whereas when working with Connections the requirement came up in virtually every workshop. There seemed to be a general understanding that a change in work culture was required in their organisations, and thus the deployment of a new community was more than simply a new platform, it required users to adopt new practices and work styles.
A second factor that often came into play is that most Jive customers also had another document management solution in place, whether for specific use cases, or for general access across the organisation – usually this was Microsoft Sharepoint. Typically this was universally detested by the users – described as unintuitive, hard to manage and impossible to search – but provided enough functionality that it could be left to handle the specific use cases where large-scale file storage was required. This is less common in the IBM world where Domino is more common as the legacy team collaboration platform, and where Sharepoint can sometimes be seen as the enemy. That’s not to say that I would propose anyone deploy Sharepoint specifically for document management (there are better tools out there if that is what is required), but simply that ‘good enough‘ is sometimes all that is needed for specific use cases that cannot be supported yet in the common collaboration platform.
But what if I want document management in my Jive community?
All that said (and I really do hope and believe that file management will no longer be an issue in 5-10 years time), it is good to have options and alternatives – no matter what your community platform of choice. Therefore I am pleased that there is a new option for Jive customers… fme Document Manager for Jive.
This partner extension for Jive, gives a brand new way to explore your files stored in the community, allowing documents to be found more quickly, files to be uploaded in bulk, inline metadata editing and direct support for almost all office applications (rather than just Microsoft Office). This 10-minute demo video covers it well:
As I made clear above, I would love us to look to transition away from formal file and document management as our primary technique for collaboration. However, if this is still required for your use cases, then do take a look a fme’s product datasheet and contact either myself or fme direct if you need more info or to discuss the options available.
Thinking of launching your own online ESN or external community?
First of all, consider each and every requirement as an individual use case, that requires its own definition, configuration and community management. As part of the definition process, one of the key discussion points is to look at how the business processes and workflows can be best supported in the community – what content types, functionality and user interactions are required. Only once these aspects are understood then look at what content types and/or files are required…
If formal document management is a necessity, then that ‘s the point at which to start considering whether something integrated like CCM or the fme solution is required, or whether those specific use cases would be better supported on a more formal and structured platform.
How do you approach this topic? Are you an advocate for document management, or do you believe that more open and unstructured collaboration is the correct approach? I’d love to hear from you in the comments below…
Jive Software is seeking a Business Consultant to join the Professional Services team for the EMEA Region, based in Paris, France. This role will work with Jive’s largest and most complex clients in formulating and implementing their strategy around usage of the Jive solutions.The Business Consultant works directly with our customers to help them get their Jive community set up and ready for launch.
This position requires strong customer interaction skills and a demonstrated background working with business teams to deliver complex, web-based projects. The successful candidate will be a natural and proactive leader, while maintaining the highest quality of delivery and attention to detail. This position represents an exciting opportunity to work with a wide array of the latest web technologies, while helping some of the best known global companies realize measurable business value with the Jive platform.
The aim is for the Business Consultant to be viewed as a trusted advisor to Jive customers and work in a way that maximizes opportunities for both parties. Performance will be measured against targets for client satisfaction, utilization of software purchased and expansion of software footprint.
The Business Consultant (BC) takes on the technical elements of the strategy role here at Jive, helping our customers configure their platform and places to support their specified use cases. It’s a mix of onsite and remote work, and the successful candidate would be working with customers across EMEA, though with a particular focus on the French market.
Jive’s office in Paris is located on the Champs Elysees. Ideally the candidate would be able to spend time there, although as always we tend to be flexible as far as location goes. You would need to be a fluent French speaker, capable of hosting workshops in that language.
If you’re interested please get in touch directly, or else visit this page for more details.
No matter what we do, or how focused or mindful we are, the time just keeps passing doesn’t it?
As the great Peter Gabriel once sung:
Whatever may come
and whatever may go
that river’s flowing
that river’s flowing
(Linking to the ’94 version with Paula Cole – my personal favourite version of an amazing song…)
Somehow, over 7 months have passed since I joined the team at Jive Software.
It seems both like my switch happened yesterday, and yet also that I’ve been here forever.
Thos months have been a hugely enjoyable yet immensely challenging period of my life. New colleagues, new customers, new culture, new technology – it has been a time of intense adjustment. If you’ve been following me for any length of time, you’ll know I’ve been in the collaboration space for the best part of two decades, and have inhabited the world of social since the mid-2000s, yet shifting into the Jive organisation and its community has been massive in terms of change for me personally. Sure, there’s some similarities with what has gone before and yet in some ways it feels like ‘chalk and cheese’ too.
But ‘it’s just a different technology?’ I hear you ask… However, that’s really just a small part of the picture.
I’ve worked with IBM, Microsoft, Atlassian and many other vendors’ products through my career, and all have their merits and their challenges, their unique features and their omissions. Jive’s products are no different in that regard – there are always some features that are due ‘in the next version’ or perhaps could be enhanced. Our customers have their lists of suggestions for where we can improve – that’s just natural.
So what’s fundamentally different about the Jive product, the company and the community?
There’s a list of elements that I want to explore over my next few posts because i think it’s important to get to the essence of what I believe makes Jive unique.
These posts aren’t intended to sway you in some commercial way – any decision such as investing in a social or collaborative platform has to be based on facts, perceived and proven value, use cases and the like, rather than solely on any emotional or relationship pull, or indeed on purely technical grounds. And that is part of the point, really. Being at Jive has helped to open my eyes to some differences in the way that vendors in this space approach customer requirements and challenges.
So look out for a series of posts on ‘Why Jive?‘ over the coming weeks. As I say, I’m not intending to try to market our solutions or even the company as a whole – we have immensely talented folks that can do that just fine. I’ve just lived this shift for real for the past months and I think it’s an interesting one to explore. As a company and a community, we believe in ‘working out loud’ so I see no better way to do that than on this blog through my own personal lens and perspective.
There were few companies in the world that could have tempted me back into permanent employment, and I was really happy to join Jive Software almost 6 months ago. I’ve loved my experience of the organisation so far – the culture and workstyle mixes damn hard work with fun, humour, camaraderie and great support from the leadership.
Therefore it’s satisfying to see that others feel the same way. Glassdoor have just published their 2015 list of the best organisations in the UK to work for:
The Glassdoor Q2 2015 UK Employment Confidence Survey revealed that two thirds of employees (66%) don’t believe or don’t know if they will receive a pay rise in the next year. But with pay and benefits a big piece of the equation for any job seeker when deciding where to work, where are UK employees most satisfied with their pay and benefits packages? To help, Glassdoor put together its annual report identifying the Top 25 UK Companies for Compensation & Benefits in 2015.
The top 10 is dominated by tech, business consulting and IT firms, with the highest rated based in London – Facebook (#1, 4.7 rating), Jive Software in Reading (#2, 4.7) and MediaMath (#3, 4.6), also London.
Whilst Facebook being number 1 has dominated the media coverage of the Glassdoor report, actually Jive Software was incredibly close to being top in the stats. For sure, we’re hugely proud to be ahead of so many awesome and well-regarded organisations!
Here’s the full list:
To give you a clue as to why Jive’s staff rate it so highly, this video gives you a feel for the company’s appreciation of our very different workstyles:
I certainly feel at home here. The company’s focus on kick-ass products and service, with a strongly-held belief in recruiting A-grade staff, allowing them to work flexibly and dynamically, all the while ‘working out loud’ through what is possibly the most vibrant and engaged ESN platform in the world suits me down to the ground.
Jive has a good number of positions open right now, so if you’d like to come to work at a company that truly believes in employee satisfaction, feel free to get in touch for more details and to hear it from someone with first hand experience!
After many months of following the progress of Jive Chime, first as a partner and prospective customer, and then as a member of the Jive team, it’s exciting to be helping to get the word out about a brand spanking new social communication product!
So what is Jive Chime?
Jive Chime is a messaging app that lets you quickly and securely connect with teammates on the go, to get the answers you need, when you need them.
Nothing revolutionary there I hear you say? We already have (insert the name of your favourite tool here… Lync/Sametime/Jabber/Slack/HipChat/WhatsApp etc), why do we need something else?
What you’d be missing is just how light-weight, fast and dynamic the Chime service is to use:
Think of it as light-weight mobile and desktop messaging, with all the features you’d imagine – push notifications, 1:1 and group (public and private) chats, ability to name conversations, a vast palette of emojis, support for sending images, sync of conversation status across all devices, secure encryption, apps for iOS/Android/Mac and Windows etc etc. It is beautiful to look and super easy to pick up and use for the first time.
So far so good, yes?
But what’s the compelling reason for using Chime, I hear you ask?
Well for me there’s three significant points I’d pick out:
That sounds awesome, how do I get started?
Sign up at jivechime.com and download the apps today!
But hey Stuart, we know you’ve been a big fan of Sametime and Slack in the past, how does it really stack up?
I think it’s a stonking v1.0 release, that represents a truly enjoyable and flexible communication network. It’s free to use, has an incredibly low barrier to entry – sign up, download the app, invite your colleagues, you’re done!
We’ve been using Chime internally as our primary communications channel since before I joined, and over 1 million messages have been sent. It really does fulfil the IM and group communication needs of a small to medium-sized business incredibly well.
I would be the first to admit there’s a few features that I cannot wait to be added (editing of previous messages being one, an iPad native UI another), but the key features are all there, and are implemented in a very very sweet way. Jive Software have more than a decade of experience helping businesses develop and enhance their collaborative cultures, and Chime is just the latest product to demonstrate that experience and thinking – this time in a way that means entire organisations can be up and running in a matter of hours.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hknHCYmv5oY
What have you got to lose? It’s free to use, after all!
Give it a try, and let me know how you get on!
I love my job.
Seriously. I know that’s a cliché, but honestly, I love what I do.
Since early 2008 when I started Collaboration Matters (which morphed into Social 365 back in 2012), I’ve been privileged to have the opportunity to consult for some of the most insightful and forward-looking organisations around the globe. 7 straight years of helping companies improve the productivity of their workforces through using social technologies; working with not-for-profit agencies developing online communities (the real meaning of ‘social enterprise’); assisting 600-year old publishing houses to develop internal communications strategies that will take them forward into the next decade or more.
With these projects and many many more besides, I have been lucky enough to have almost constant work to take on, plenty of challenges to get my teeth into, and to be blunt, to continue to put food on my family’s table. That’s not to mention the opportunity to blog, to podcast and even to start a user group that has now met in 8 different countries over the past 4 years.
From Collaboration to Enterprise2.0, through Social Business and ESNs, then onto Working Out Loud and Digital Transformation, the terminology may have changed in those 7 years, but here in 2015 I believe even more strongly in the value of these technologies and approaches to make a real impact on working practices and to help change organisational culture for the better.
I love doing my own thing, feeling as though there are no boundaries to what can be achieved through my own energy, drive and commitment.
So all that said… I’m giving it up.
I am delighted to announce that later this month I will be joining Jive Software as a Senior Strategy Consultant in their Customer Success organisation.
If you’d have asked me 6 months ago whether I’d give up my company to go permanent again, I’d have said ‘no way!’, at least not for the foreseeable future.
However, there have been a few nudges along the way that have convinced me that this is the right next step in my career…
Firstly, at one of my most recent engagements, I’ve had the amazing opportunity to review and analyse more than 30 different platforms in order to create a short list for their procurement process, and then to take those solutions through to final selection. There is no doubt in my mind (both objectively and subjectively) that Jiven emerged as by far the strongest offering in this marketplace. Whilst the analysts might squabble about the final order of their leaders, they unanimously view Jive Software as one of the strongest and most focused vendors in this space. My own personal experience in past customer engagements, and again during this selection process, leave me with no doubt that this is almost certainly the most rounded offering out there, and if there are any weaknesses at all, that Jive Software are driven to resolve them at the first opportunity. In addition, rather than having one offering to fit all organisational scenarios, I love Jive’s approach of having packaged solutions for internal and external communities, plus their focus on different work types and on new solutions for those organisations that need lighter and more mobile-driven apps.
Secondly, I’ve been hugely impressed by everyone I have met in the months since I was first approached. Every single individual has been focused, insightful, passionate about their roles and hugely pumped up about the future of the company. One review of the organisation on GlassDoor said the following:
Jive has flipped the typical corporate ratio of top performers to mediocre performers on its head. At most companies 90% of the workforce has middle of the road performance with 10% being top performers. Jive is just the opposite. 90% of the staff are top performers and 10% are middle of the road. This is truly the most competent and highly skilled group of colleagues I have ever worked with. It makes it a pleasure to come to work.
I’ve been honoured to work with some fantastically talented colleagues over the years, but I am genuinely excited to be joining my new team.
Thirdly, moving to Jive does not undermine the friendships I have built in the wonderfully unique Lotus/ICS community. I consider so many people in the community to be my very best friends in the world, and I will stay in touch with you however and whenever I can. However, this is the right time for me to take a different path, to switch gears, and to embark on a new adventure with an organisation that is 100% focused on making the social collaboration ideal a reality.
So, in summary, you’ll probably have realised that I am really pumped up and excited by this opportunity at Jive. It just feels that the environment, the timing and the role is right. I have no doubt that I’ll miss some of what I have now, but boy, I can’t wait to see what else is out there!
A really useful new whitepaper from Jive, authored by the always insightful Gia Lyons:
Many of today’s intranets are frustrating: Frustrating for employees to use, for content owners to govern, for IT to integrate, maintain and support. It’s time to modernize and mobilize. But, what should a modern, mobile intranet do and look like?
It boils down to three fundamental focal areas:
- delivering information and expertise seamlessly and securely across devices,
- giving people the tools to work better and faster and
- offering an open platform that integrates with a variety of systems people use across the company.
I break down each specific element of the modern intranet below.
Taking the reader through those focal areas in more detail, this 4-page whitepaper details some of the key characteristics of a next-generation intranet platform.
Whilst it is in no way surprising that Jive Software’s solutions deliver these characteristics better than most, this is a useful paper to share with colleagues to outline a vision for how a reimagined corporate intranet might deliver real business benefits. The arguments are equally as valid for IBM-based solutions such as IBM Connections and IBM Connections Cloud (formerly IBM SmartCloud for Social Business).
[Originally posted on Jive News]