Jive Community - JiveTalks Blog

Deal Management Made Easy: The Devoteam Story

tara.panu — Wed, 19 Jun 2013 15:34:56 +0000

Your company's sales team requires consistent up-to-date product and customer information, along with ongoing support from their team in order to close deals faster. Traditional methods and other conventional tools don’t provide the rich interaction, knowledge infusion and team collaboration that sales enablement depends on.

Through the combination of rapid expansion and growth of advanced technology solutions, Devoteam's sales reps found themselves pursuing larger deals. As a result, sales cycles became a longer and a more expensive process - requiring the involvement of many more groups across all departments. The standard system of interaction including long email chains, multiple phone calls and meetings could not match the demand. Devoteam needed a more unified and sustainable method of collaboration that could reinforce the fast growing pace of the company. This led them to turn to Jive to support their new sales platform. The results were dramatic, as Devoteam streamlined deal collaboration to shorten sales cycles and increase win rates leading to some serious cost savings highlighted here:

Webcast: How to Rethink Your Intranet

melissabarker — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 12:04:55 +0000

Did you know that your employees are likely spending 28 hours every week just trying to get work done? For a company with 5,000 knowledge workers at $30 an hour, that’s over $4 million in payroll alone. In this interactive “white board session” webcast, you’ll discover exactly what a social intranet is and how it should be used to virtually eliminate this problem—for real business value.

You’ll see how to:

Achieve 15% increase in productivity and 3% increase in revenue.*
Identify the obstacles of traditional intranets.
Get more value from your existing communication and productivity tools.
Give employees what they need to drive strategic initiatives, innovation, and productivity.
Engage mobile employees, partners, and customers.

* Verified by a top 3 consulting firm.

Thursday, June 27th at 11am PT join us for a webcast to hear from Gia Lyons Director of Product Marketing at Jive Software and Claire Flanagan, Director of Business Value at Jive Software.

Reserve your seat here today!

Summer school, Jive style

Carrie Gilbert — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 16:51:46 +0000

If you've had the opportunity to participate in a Jive strategy session, chances are you've seen this image before. It's intended to illustrate how different roles require different amounts of training:

Light-weight, on-demand assistance for individual community members to get them started in the right direction and help them solve any issues that may arise
Role-specific guidance for specialized roles, like your advocates, to help them better understand what's expected of them and what "model behavior" looks like
Extensive hands-on sessions for anyone who will be spending a lot of time configuring permissions, setting up spaces, and otherwise actively managing the community

As you approach the bottom of the pyramid, it's often easier to recognize that those who will be spending significant time setting up the community or running it on a day-to-day basis require a more formal training approach. But providing your community members with the right level of information to help them adopt Jive more effectively can be tricky: you can't expect them to invest too much time or energy in learning a new (often optional) tool, but without some initial explanation, they may struggle with key concepts. To make it a bit easier for you to bring your newest members up to speed on key Jive concepts, the Jive Training team has created the Jive Training Video Library. This collection of 10 brief videos (each around 2–3 minutes or less) explains basic concepts like streams, the Jive inbox, following, and content creation.

>> Check out the videos here: https://community.jivesoftware.com/community/training/videos Your users can access the videos directly here in the Jive Community.

But to make it even easier for people to access them right where they need them most—from within your community—we will also soon be unveiling the new Jive Training App. The beta release of this app will allow your community members to access the latest training videos (including additional titles as they become available) via a Jive app, where they can:

Track which videos they've watched
Post questions or comments on each video
Share videos with their peers
Quickly link to videos from other content

>> To sign up for the Jive Training App beta, just let us know in the comments below or send a direct message to me, Carrie Gilbert. And for even more Jive Training goodness, be sure not to miss Jivers' Ed training at JiveWorld!

VideoBlog: How Jive Transforms Our Own Sales Team

jarrett.obrien — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 14:08:19 +0000

Sales leaders across industries face common challenges of getting new sales reps up to speed, driving initiatives through a distributed sales force, and streamlining sales cycles. Our President of Worldwide Field Operations Jay Larson has seen these challenges throughout his career at many companies, which inspired him to share some of his experiences and how he's been leveraging Jive to maximize effectiveness of the sales team at Jive.

Many of these items likely look familiar to any executive trying to grow business:

Aggressively growing our sales team via hiring
Constant innovation (4X per year) and new products / services to sell
Evolving and reinforcing our sales methodology
Entering new markets such as EMEA and APAC
Ensuring the sales team knows how to sell new products via M&A activity such as Clara, StreamOnce, Producteev, and Meetings.io.

The only constant is change and a distributed sales team is not easy to keep up to date. Like our customers we leverage leading technology throughout our sales department, all used for different reasons. Salesforce.com to manage lead and opportunity activities and reporting, Netsuite as our finance system of record, in addition to Marketo for lead scoring. We have business intelligence, compensation, and many other types of software. However, all these tools are used by our sellers to provide insight and historical data, not necessarily to sell more or roll out Jay's new initiatives.

After several months now at Jive, Jay's perspective and comparison to how different life can be in accomplishing those big goals set out in front of him with vs. without Jive is captured in part (there's a part 2 coming soon) below.

I would love to hear your thoughts any thoughts, especially from those of you who also leverage Jive for your sales organization - does this ring true? Feel free to also join the Sales Community and connect with Jay.

Webcast: Win Business Faster with Social Business

melissabarker — Wed, 22 May 2013 19:48:00 +0000

With clients’ expecting "real-time" responses to RFPs, marketing agencies have to act fast to find experts and develop innovative solutions that win new business. But with agency teams distributed globally, it is increasingly difficult to coordinate a comprehensive response that incorporates relevant case studies, employee backgrounds, and 'elegant solutions' for each opportunity within a few days.

Wednesday, May 29th at 11am PT join us for a webcast to hear from Jackie Bartolotta \from Millward Brown and Elizabeth Brigham from Jive Software about how Millward Brown is generating new business by using social business technology to find internal experts, collaborate on proposals, and reduce the time it takes to respond to RFPs.

Attendees will learn how high-performing marketing agency teams use social business tools for:

Finding experts faster and collaborating with global teams on RFP responses
Developing and launching campaigns more efficiently
Coordinating cross-functional team alignment
Creating, sharing and getting feedback on campaign assets faster
Monitoring and engaging in feedback on campaigns to drive optimization

Reserve your seat here.

The Tactical Truth about Content Marketing

elizabeth.brigham — Mon, 20 May 2013 16:18:19 +0000

Imagine that you're planning your next product launch -- and it's going to be big. As the product marketing manager, you're excited to focus squarely on acquiring new leads for a venture into a new market, but there's a twist: You have lots of education to do at the top of the funnel to get new customers interested in this new, different product. How do you make that happen? Sure, there's plenty of brand equity you can rely on and you can hope for the best. After all, you're part of a company that's been around for over 20 years with rock-solid results. But now you have to get customers to think about your brand in a new way, and none of your old case studies or promotional materials fit the bill.

The answer, you realize, is a serious investment in content marketing.

It's the buzzword of the year: From top consumer brands to major B2B players, from agencies to small businesses, everyone is talking about content marketing. Whether it's white papers, featured articles, blog posts, infographics, videos, or dozens of other tactics, relevant content marketing can educate potential consumers; fuel brand value; generate quality leads; boost authority; and communicate core messages.

But it’s easy to talk the talk about content marketing. Anyone can say they’ll turn their marketing department into a lead-generating, loyalty-boosting, kick-butt-content-king.

Walking the walk, however, isn’t easy. Dreams of content greatness can quickly morph into in-the-trenches nightmares with overwhelming commitments to creating dozens of content pieces, each of which requires planning, writing, editing, proofreading and graphic design, not to mention the sign-off and say-so of several stakeholders. Without the right tools to optimize content workflow and collaboration, you can easily start to feel like you’re feeding a hungry content “beast” rather than implementing a thoughtful strategy.

So what does that mean for your team, which must plan, produce, and disseminate high-quality content to meet your product marketing goals? How can you develop a content production machine that runs smoothly? How can you get feedback and insights on results so you can publish content that drives results?

Social business technologies allow you to take your big content marketing ideas to the next level by going beyond high-level strategy to tactical tips for the trenches. Here’s the bottom line on what you truly need to get a handle on content marketing for a powerful product launch, brand awareness campaign or thought leadership effort:

1. A central hub where all content participants can plan.

Successful content marketing involves a variety of participants, depending on the project. There are the marketing folks, of course, but there might be a freelance writer and contracted graphic designer. Product, sales and PR teams might need to be looped in. An outside agency may need a seat at the table. External partners might be part of the dissemination process. Best-of-breed social business technologies allow you to create central workplaces where all stakeholders can come together and have total visibility into everything related to the project. With Jive for Marketing's Purposeful Places, for example, pre-built templates let you speedily bring together all the people, tools, info and content you need for a project in one central workspace. And most importantly there's a specific template for collateral development that helps teams get cracking quickly.

2. Better document collaboration.

Once you start growing your content marketing, it’s easy to find yourself stuck in quicksand-like endless email threads, multiple attachments, out-of-sync versions and frustrated participants. It's like trying to be your own publisher without a newsroom setup. You need unified document collaboration so versions stay under control, co-authoring and commenting is easy and integrates with existing tools. Jive has a full-featured text editor, for instance, or Jive for Office turns Microsoft Office into a real-time document collaboration platform.

3. Easy access to subject matter experts.

Maybe you have to put together a slew of new, quality content pieces for that product launch. Or, you might require fresh storytelling spins on old content to keep up with product updates. One important way to do that is by getting internal subject matter experts involved in content development. Social business allows you to easily find, connect with and loop in thought leaders, whether they are C-suite executives, sales managers, product development leaders or technical experts. Jive's smart activity streams, blog posts, status updates, and @mentions mean even the busiest folks across the company are accessible, no matter what city or time zone they work in.

4. Customer and partner connections in external communities.

To come up with great content marketing ideas and strategies, a focus group made up of customers or partners can offer invaluable input and real-time feedback, particularly when it comes to product launches. Social business communities can serve as the kind of creative crowdsourcing that power-charges your content marketing, while offering a central place where you can share and disseminate useful content that boosts brand affinity and customer loyalty. Jive's customer and partner communities offer the opportunity for authentic dialogue, insights, and two-way interaction that takes content marketing strategies to the next level.

5. Intelligence and analytics at your fingertips.

Developing successful content requires knowing what customers want to understand and need to know as well as the best way to provide information and education. Social business technologies can help put content strategy in context through intelligence and analytics. For instance, you can learn more about customers and partners through Jive Resonata, the industry-leading community analytics tool, which offers real-time intelligence within external communities to understand sentiment trends, hot topics and help predict potential opportunities. And within the organization, everybody can use Jive Impact Metrics internally to measure and maximize the impact and reach, reaction and influence of communications shared across teams and departments -- whether through blogs, status updates or discussions threads.

You can transform your organization into a killer content marketing machine that drives more opportunities and sales. Download this whitepaper for more information. How invested is your team in content marketing today? Comment below.

Transforming Company Culture through Social Business

tara.panu — Fri, 17 May 2013 14:56:35 +0000

Decentralized organizations tend to utilize many channels of information flow in order to solve complex problems. However, without a way to manage this flow, departments can easily lose sight of the organization's common mission, which leads to information loss. UBM, a global events-led marketing and communications service provider, operates in more than a dozen distinct divisional functions all over Europe, Asia, and North America. The decentralized nature of the organization made is extremely difficult for employees to connect with peers in different locations and business units in order to share their business experience and expertise. The need to leverage business synergies was more crucial than ever and became the catalyst for igniting a change in the company.

Their vision of a "One-Company" initiative led them to Jive. As a result, UBM went from a federated company with divisional and functional silos to one with a UBM-wide employee enterprise social network, powered by Jive, where transparency and collaboration reign. The impact of social software was apparent within the first 12 months of deployment. As a result, employees were spending less time on administrative work and more time creating and developing new ideas and impactful programs. Get the details of the results that UBM found in this deck: Transforming Company Culture through Social Business

Cracking the Code on Workforce Productivity

christopher — Wed, 08 May 2013 15:08:27 +0000

Technology by itself is not going to be enough to make a workforce more productive -- it requires a clear line of site to business value.

Let's start by looking at the state of business today: businesses have developed and implemented over-engineered, automated processes. And in the quest to create productivity, we now have the 24 hr workday.

We need to figure out how to go on this "productivity" quest, but in a fundamentally different direction. Looking back at the last 60 years, we have been cranking 100% growth in productivity every two decades. The punchline is that we have now reached a point where it is just not working. There isn't an option not to be more productive. Industry opportunity and competition drive a treadmill dynamic that is always accelerating. We streamlined process and then over-engineered it. We automated as many things as we could. We even gave up our personal time, our vacations, and our weekends on all the quest to keep up. Ultimately, we need a fundamentally new approach to the problem.According to McKinsey, 28 hours of every work week are spent on sorting emails and finding the information needed to do our job.

The question remains: How do we get workers to an even higher level productivity? I elaborate on the answer in this deck.

CMSWire's Customer Communities Tweet Jam

CurtisG — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 15:01:56 +0000

Last week, I participated in CMSWire's April Tweet Jam about growing and engaging customer communities. I want to take the opportunity to dive deeper based on which topics people in the Jive Community are interested in discussing further. Below you will see my answers. I want to hear from you: which answer would you like me to expand on?

1. What are the most important communities for organizational success and who owns them?

2. What are the top three opportunities customer communities provide organizations today?

3. How do you measure / evaluate that value?

One person suggested that 'Likes' are a key way to measure value, my response:

4. Name three best practices for successful customer communities.

5. List the three biggest challenges to running a successful customer community.

6. Has social media changed customer communities? If so, in what ways?

7. How will customer communities evolve in the next year?

For more information about proving business value, check out this best practices paper.

Moving from Social Media to a Social Business

elizabeth.brigham — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 16:53:48 +0000

Over the last few years marketers have become increasingly knowledgable and skilled in social media strategy and tactics. We've dedicated resources to creating content on social media; we've shifted our percentage of media spend to favor digital executions; and, we've spent hours on the weekends culling through spreadsheets full of page views, likes, shares, comments and unique visitor data. However, somewhere along the way in spending 6 figures on marketing tools, we've forgotten about the investment we've made in the marketers and agency partners who actually develop the strategies and get the work done.

While social media has opened new channels through which to communicate with our customers, it's also caused us to be much more tactically-focused. In effect, we've created silos within our marketing teams handicapping efficiency and productivity. When it comes to launching a new product, getting every marketing discipline together at the same time and aligned on strategy can be like herding cats. When we add on the additional layer of a global marketing team, it's shocking we ever get anything out the door because we don't have one central place to coordinate, share and learn from each other. In the end, too many new products launch late and/or are over budget.

It's time to move away from operating tactically and instead strategically "network" our marketing organizations to drive the greatest potential productivity. Taking the skills we've honed working in social media can help us cross the chasm into becoming a social business. Social business technology offers marketers the ability to bring all key stakeholders into one place (regardless of where they're physically located) to develop strategy, to plan and assign tactics by discipline, to execute the strategy, and to review performance data to identify opportunities to optimize the campaign.

Today, I'm throwing down the gauntlet - it's time for us to move our marketing organizations into the 21st century and become social businesses.

Social Media, Social Marketing, Social Business – what’s the difference?

As marketers we’re really great at coining terms and using them to mean different things across B2B, B2C and our industries. For the purpose of our discussion, I will define them in a business context as:

Social Media – a communication channel through which to engage prospects, customers and professional acquaintances.
Social Marketing – a collection of tactics that leverage social media to execute a marketing strategy (e.g. new product launch)
Social Business* - an organization that has put in place strategies, technologies and processes to systematically engage all the individuals of its ecosystem (employees, customers, partners, suppliers) to maximize the co-created value

As Nilofer Merchant notes in her article “What we talk about when we talk about social”

No term is ever complete. Each of us are building on each others' ideas as we collectively grapple with understanding and decoding what is happening, and what we think it means. . . . When we focus on tools alone, I think we're making a mistake. . . .The bigger point is that major changes are afoot that change value creation, the meaning of work, and the structures for our institutions.

Semantics aside, our focus for 2013 should be on realigning the culture of our marketing organizations to first focus on the people – the marketers – who are doing the work and secondly on the tactics they need to execute.

If it's good enough for our customers, why isn't it good enough for us?

Today most marketers at least know about social technologies and many of them have been executing on an external social strategy. At Disney, connecting with guests wherever they were was important and key to our success. We had dedicated resources to developing content and to engaging with guests across the social web. But until 2011, social media was something we leveraged as an external communication channel. This didn't just happen at Disney, it happens every day across marketing organizations (B2B and B2C) - we continue to use social media to develop relationships with our customers, but we haven't taken it inside our team to drive productivity and competitive advantage.

How do we bridge that gap? How do we take the best practices we’ve developed around connecting, sharing and learning with customers in social media into our marketing teams?

Let’s start with a story. Say you’re launching a new product. The first thing you need to do is develop your go-to-market strategy. Typically as a brand or product marketing manager, you consult (or conduct) research and learnings from previous product launches, determine the benefits of the product features, assess what the competition is doing and take your first pass at a high level strategy. After that you probably review your ideas (in PowerPoint) with your manager and maybe your manager’s manager…and the VP…and the SVP…and finally there’s a decision. Throughout all of these conversations you’re the person behind the curtain building and rebuilding PowerPoint slides or Word documents based on everyone’s feedback. You send along copies via email and get more feedback. A couple weeks or months (depending on your company culture) later, you’ve got something that you could turn into a creative brief and share with your cross-functional team to “kick off” the launch plan.

Even at this early stage in product launch planning, you’ve had to consult many different resources for historical information; you’ve sent around about 50 emails; you’ve gathered feedback manually from several stakeholders (some of which is conflicting); you’ve had to plan and re-plan meetings due to crazy schedules; and, you’ve iterated on PowerPoint slides 10 times.

Now imagine if all of your key stakeholders had access to the documents and could provide feedback in one place. You wouldn’t have to worry about the administrative tasks in setting up and rescheduling meetings.

Once the strategy was baked, you could open up your product launch “war room” to your cross-functional teammates and your agencies. You’d have one virtual area where you could bring in anyone around the world to connect, share and learn when it was convenient for them.

All of the steps to launching a product are heavily reliant on the people doing the work. Yet, we’re still so focused on marketing automation tools and the tactical elements. Given that you’re investing 70% of operating costs on the marketers thinking and developing strategies, getting input from leadership and collaborating with colleagues to drive business forward, our focus seems misplaced.

What social technologies do best is connect people to each other. We realize that from our interactions with customers and our friends on social media. If it’s good enough for our customers, why isn’t it good enough for our marketing organizations?

Becoming customer-centric starts with us walking the walk. To drive competitive advantage, marketers need to evolve into a social business - an organization that has put in place strategies, technologies and processes to systematically engage all the individuals of its ecosystem (employees, customers, partners, suppliers) to maximize the co-created value.

How is your marketing organization evolving into a social business? For best practices on transforming your marketing team, download this best practices paper.

How a Social Intranet Transformed Thomson Reuters' Workforce

melissabarker — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 14:00:00 +0000

Social Business isn't just about connecting employees and customers to "collaborate better" wherever they are, from whatever device. It's about delivering real value to businesses, to the tune of $1.3 trillion annually, according to McKinsey Global Institute.

Tuesday, April 30th at 10am PT join us for a webcast to hear how Thomson Reuters rolled out a social intranet to its 60,000 employees for driving innovation, aligning everyone to the company strategy and generating a more collaborative working environment across the 100 countries they operate in. You will get to hear from Tim Wike, Director of Intranet Strategy and Operations at Thomson Reuters, and Gia Lyons Director of Product Marketing at Jive Software.

Some key takeaways include information about how to:

Change the way your business communicates to capture innovation and build alignment.
Enable your employees to find information faster.
Build a business case around a social intranet initiative.
Measure the success of a social intranet initiative.

Register for this webcast here.

Jive's Response to "Employees don't like their social intranets, study says"

sfwinter — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 14:29:29 +0000

Last night while perusing my twitter feed I saw a tweet from Mark Ragan that intrigued me:

This sounds alarming in nature, so I thought this would be a good time to discuss the points of this article.

Trouble Finding Value

Here is the deal: Prescient Digital, a Toronto-based agency, recently polled "651 participants from organizations of all types and sizes from across the planet". While this sample size is not the most statistically significant sample and there is no clear mention of company size, let's address the findings one by one:

The firm's 2013 Social Intranet Study found that 76 percent of the companies surveyed use instant messaging, at least in some limited way. About 75 percent use blogs. Around two-thirds have wikis, discussion forums, and user comments. It's fair to say social tools are being used widely.
However, only 19 percent of organizations rated their social intranet tools as good or very good. Even fewer executives, 17 percent, like them.
Toby Ward, president of Prescient Digital Media, says the tools are easy to come by, but demonstrating their value is considerably tougher.
"Enterprise social media is still seen, at least by the executive suite, as something that isn't necessarily mission critical, but as something to keep the masses happy," he says.

We recently worked with a top three global consulting firm to survey actual Jive customers about what the business value Jive has brought to their organization. The results can be downloaded here. I'll take a moment to share with you a few highlights. Those companies using the Jive platform reported 15% increased worker productivity and 2-4% increase in topline revenue. This is because these businesses were able to:

reduce time looking for information and expertise within in the company by 34%
reduce meetings by 16%
reduce email load by 21%

And that’s just scratching the surface. Employee engagement is higher when implementations are focused on specific use cases that solve real business problems for sales teams, marketing teams, customer service solutions and/or the corporate intranet. Companies doing this see better strategic alignment and up to a 24% drop in employee turnover.

Ward then goes on to describe three factors that differentiate those companies that see value in social intranets from those who do not:

First, executives accept that the technology is worthwhile and even champion it. Second, those companies make investments in the tools that fit their business goals. Third, those companies have change-management procedures in place.

These three factors have always been of the utmost importance at Jive. They alone will not make a social platform work, but without them you have absolutely no chance, as clearly evidenced by the 17% of executives that like their social tools.

You Get What You Pay For

Next we learn a bit about the budgets with which these 651 respondents are paying:

Companies don't spend very much on their social intranets, either. A plurality of respondents, 47 percent, said they have spent less than $10,000 on social tools. Ward adds that intranet budgets are generally 1/50 to 1/100 of external website budgets.
Intranets are viewed as simply less important than websites, because they're indirect, whereas external websites communicate directly with customers, Ward says. "It's tougher to think about," he says.

It doesn't look like we are dealing with a lot of Fortune 500 companies in this survey. In this space, it is true that you get what you pay for. A successful implementation needs to take into consideration the use cases, best practices, launch support, and much more, which you get from Jive's professional services team.

Measure? Measure!

Here is a (BIG) part of the problem:

Virtually no organizations—not even those where people are satisfied with their social tools—measure the ROI of their social intranets. Only 6 percent of respondents said they do.

We fully support this statement! It is true that without measurement, you cannot justify the cost or prove the business value.

Ward then goes on to back our approach:

Yet there are measurable benefits, such as cost savings from increased productivity, Ward says. Companies could get a lot out of measuring ROI.
"If they just spent a little bit more money and a little bit more time on their efforts, they would get the returns they think [they could]," he says.

..."One of the reasons why we do this study is just for this reason," he says. "You show executives the results, the findings, the recommendations. There's empirical evidence that shows if you invest, you do the change management, and you do it well, there are significant returns."

We couldn't agree more.

Be sure to download our whitepaper on finding business value here. I want to hear from you, where do you get the most value from social business?

Transforming Healthcare with Social Business

tara.panu — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 16:08:49 +0000

Healthcare is complex and constantly shifting. As technology changes are occurring daily, it is imperative that the healthcare industry adapt with the technology age. Cerner is taking steps to help fix one of the largest challenges that still exists in healthcare today: communication and collaboration. Cerner wanted to speed up the process to surface clinical innovations, gather requirements, and leverage new clinical practices and technology. Their vision: go social to leverage mass collaboration and reduce time between discovery and adoption.They chose Jive to meet those needs.

While most companies clearly separate their associate-facing and public-facing communities, Cerner’s Jive-powered platform, called uCern, uniquely combines both. More than 1,700 separate healthcare organizations communicate and collaborate on uCern—of which Cerner is just one.

Although the focus of uCern is on the broader community and their needs and issues, Cerner also reaps a number of operational business benefits, most significantly the ability to answer questions more quickly and a significant improvement in the design quality of its solutions—driven by the ability to communicate broadly in parallel with its diverse stakeholders.

Cerner + Jive = Real Business Value

13% fewer support issues logged to all areas of Cerner’s business by clients who are uCern users
An 8% decrease in issues logged on Cerner software solutions year over year
A 15% decrease in issues logged internally by Cerner associates to all areas of the business
A 70% decrease in Human Resources issues logged internally by Cerner associates
Software support questions answered in hours instead of days
Shorter approval cycles for technical

“With uCern, we have embraced a new culture that says, ‘Not only is it okay to share information, but we should be sharing information sooner rather than later.’ In this industry, which is typically very guarded, there are not many organizations doing what we are doing on the scale we are doing it.” Brice Jewell, Senior Manager

From its foundation, Cerner has been at the intersection of information technology and healthcare delivery. With its Jive-powered platform, Cerner, has taken on a unique role as facilitator, cheerleader, and mentor for the role social business software can play in the healthcare industry.

The benefits of social business are vast, learn about other ways that social business can impact your organization in this whitepaper.

Are you currently using social business software? How has it improved the way you work? I'd love to hear from you.

Teaching Users to Create Support Cases (Part 2)

mathew.ladd — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 19:34:37 +0000

Just as I promised in my last blog, Teaching Users to Create Support Cases (Part 1), here is part two of our weekly Support Training that takes place every Friday at 8:30 a.m. PST. I, like so many, am a visual learner, so this blog serves as a step by step with images of what users will find in the Jive Community as they make their way through their private spaces to find content, participate in discussions, create cases, and more! To get an invite to the weekly training, use this blog as an instruction manual to create a case requesting to be added to our webinar. This training is great for all Jive users, new and old alike!

Why Your Intranet Should Be Seamlessly Social

gialyons — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 13:07:11 +0000

In The Problem with Traditional Intranets, I explained that employees are hampered by their company's traditional communication and collaboration tools across five behaviors of high performers:

Understand their organization's overall strategy, and how they contribute
Informally learn from others in similar roles
Find experts and their knowledge to improve work in progress
Collaborate with others to create and deliver quality work products
Share their knowledge with others

Let's explore how social technologies can address these obstacles to higher performance, starting with (4) Collaborate with others to create and deliver quality work, and (5) Share their knowledge with others.

What would you say you do here?

Forget about technology for a moment. What do people DO in your organization? Probably variations on the following:

Develop products
Develop campaigns
Update websites
Plan events
Launch products
Create client presentations
Write sales proposals
Manage client projects
Resolve customer issues

And what tools do you use to do these things? Perhaps one or more of these:

Email
Phone calls
Conference rooms
Web meetings
Chat messaging
Wikis
Microsoft Office
Google Docs
Microsoft SharePoint
Dropbox
Box
Basecamp
CRM
ERP

That's a lot of tools.

One of the biggest problems with using all of these disconnected tools is that you can’t keep track of actions needed or decisions made across all of them, and you have no idea about the context of the work done, weeks later. And forget about using some of them on a mobile device.

So, how can a social intranet help?

First, social isn’t a software stack. It’s a way of doing business that requires the seamless flow of information, context, and activity across different applications and business activities.

A social intranet:

is used from within your most common tools, such as MS Office, SharePoint, Lync, Google Docs, Google Drive, Box, Salesforce.com, etc.
consolidates within a single, searchable area the actions assigned, decisions made, and the conversation threads and activity streams happening across those tools
delivers all of these tools in the context of a specific process to your mobile devices

In short, a social intranet becomes the hub, the system of record for collaboration.

Here's an example.

Let's say an IT team is beginning to develop a new application for one of their business lines. They would likely follow a process like this:

Gather requirements from the business people
Develop solution that fits into the company's technology architecture
Define use cases
Build a prototype and present it to the business people for feedback
Repeat until requirements stop moving, and technology architecture is feasible

And they'd likely use these tools to collaborate:

Microsoft Office/Google Docs
SharePoint/Google Drive
Email
Web meetings
Chat messaging
Source control repository
Bug tracking system

But, issues like these are abound:

Where is the latest Excel version of the requirements? I think someone emailed a new version yesterday.

I can't keep coding until I get an update from the Bangalore team, and they're asleep.

Who from the business side can make a decision on this new issue?

Why did the business people change the requirements again? Is it documented somewhere?

With a social intranet as the system of collaboration, all those emails and documents would automatically get posted and updated with the latest versions and replies to one place, no matter who sends them. The team can ask and answer one another's questions around the clock using email, the source control repository, and the bug tracking system, knowing that everything is streamed to their social intranet place, and made available on their most used mobile devices. The project manager can post project governance information, alerts, meeting notes, and designate decisions made and actions needed within conversation threads. Best of all: this team's work in progress would appear in the social intranet's streams and search results, get recommended to others across the company, and appear next to similar content (subject to view permissions).

That's how a social intranet helps people collaborate with others to create and deliver quality work, and share their knowledge with others while they're working. How do you use your social intranet to work better?

Learn more about how a social intranet can impact your business by downloading this Whitepaper.