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!
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?
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]