The New Future of Work: A Peek into Jive’s Future History

Today, employees are at the forefront of a revolution in workplace collaboration that Jive started. With beautifully-designed, intuitive apps in their personal lives, people are no longer satisfied to stick with employers’ ineffective and uninspired legacy systems at work. Companies that don’t “get it” and fail to provide employees with tools they want to use are forcing them to “get it” elsewhere. This goes against strategic company objectives to unify the workplace and increase productivity across the board.

The changing workplace

Business has finally caught on to what Jive’s early adopters have known all along — that collaboration technologies must be real-time, mobile, global and heterogeneous. That’s important, because, increasingly, work isn’t confined to internal teams within an office’s four walls. Work groups are more diverse than ever. They consist of external consultants, part-time employees, contractors, freelancers, partner networks, supply chains, distributors, agencies and even clients.

To remain competitive, modern companies must connect all of those people, systems and tools in ways that were impossible — or even unimaginable — a few short years ago. Collaboration must cross borders while respecting boundaries; it must be open yet secure and, most of all, it must be contextual and easy to use. In this new future of work, collaboration isn’t an afterthought, it is where it all begins.

Visible. Searchable. Memorable. Today.

What companies need today is a way to make work visible, searchable and memorable from any device — something that Jive alone offers. A powerful interactive intranet allows companies to tap into their biggest asset — corporate memory — wherever and whenever they need to. Much-hyped “teamware” approaches to collaboration tend to actually fuel corporate memory loss by limiting information to specific people, while solutions like Jive makes invisible work visible throughout the enterprise. Rather than “bolted-on” approaches that center around document management solutions, companies need a modern intranet built from the ground up with the social graph in mind to put people at the center. Content, places, notifications and alerts should all point to the person who has the knowledge and expertise to answer the question that prompted a search in the first place.

A recent University of California, Santa Barbara study conducted by professor Paul Leonardi bears this out. In one company, researchers found that a Jive Interactive Intranet improved both workers’ metaknowledge (who knows whom) and their “ambient awareness” (who knows what) within the organization. After only six months of using Jive, employees’ ambient awareness jumped 31 percent. What’s more, the company’s metaknowledge shot up 88 percent! These results highlight the importance of a unified, connected solution that meets the enterprise’s changing needs for people.

Jive into the future

As a company that’s been at the forefront of digital workplace transformation for more than 15 years, we at Jive are more resolute than ever to continue what we started: empowering people to work better together. We invented enterprise collaboration by connecting people in ways they were not connected before. Large organizations across dozens of industries and lines of business use our solution to boost productivity, increase engagement and help millions of employees get work done. We have a steadfast commitment and the best minds in the business on the case, including our amazing customers. By helping organizations combine people, information and technology in brand new ways, Jive is well-positioned to continue to be the foundation and the fabric that makes work happen — today, tomorrow and well into the future.

We envision a digital workplace that connects employees, customers and partners in a single, virtual WorkHub. Jive will not simply be a “place” or a “destination,” it will also be a pervasive virtual workplace. An open, innovative platform that brings people, ideas, processes, work streams, devices and applications together. Changing the way work gets done in our digital world is about creating experiences for people. The more employees interact and engage with Jive, the more they learn and the more personalized and efficient the experience becomes. In this way, the WorkHub is intelligent, flexible and contextual; regardless of teams, locations or workstyles.

Every day, we imagine and work on the future of workplace collaboration. It’s our mission. Don’t blink — because it starts now. In our latest release, we’re introducing new capabilities that include breakthrough personal analytics to drive faster and more informed decisions; intelligent profiles that streamline access to an organization’s knowledge base; and enhanced integration that infuses social monitoring functionality throughout the entire digital workplace. This is yet another important milestone in the vision we first unveiled at our JiveWorld16 conference.

And we are only getting started.