It is good news for my hometown Palo Alto that Jive Software is moving its HQ here. And it is good news for business too. Jive is clearly getting traction and that is good news for business because Jive sells the kind of software that companies need to enable collaboration and to avoid the problems I outlined in “Let’s talk chickens and e2.0.” The chicken story taught us that companies win or lose based on the performance of their teams, not individuals; and increasingly, on the performance of teams of teams, distributed teams of teams, and networks of teams, customer communities and partners.
Social Business Software, to quote from Jive’s home page, fuels engagement with customers, employees and partners. I’ve written before about the power of social business software to transform businesses:
- By creating a community of shared values like in Walmart’s Elevenmoms initiative.
- By driving employee engagement and alignment demonstrated by Best Buy in “How Best Buy’s Execution Culture Creates Social Media Success.”
- By enabling the intelligence of people to better inform decision making in “What’s wrong with today’s enterprise software? [Emergent Intelligence]” and in “Netflix: Make more customer magic with your people and your data.”
In a recent survey by IBM’s Institute for Business Value reported in Business Week, 1,500 CEOs identified creativity as the most important leadership competency for the successful enterprise of the future. These CEO’s understand the equation “Human Capital x Social Capital = Productivity and Innovation.”
Collaboration is far more valuable to productivity and innovation than our current enterprise systems and processes allow for. As Valdis Krebs of Orgnet wrote, to actually get your work done, you tap into the organization sideways, leveraging your informal contacts across the company. Things get done through informal networks, what Nenshad Bardoliwalla calls human integrators of the white space, the space between systems, business processes and job descriptions.
Social Business Software is the foundation for the next generation enterprise, where emergent intelligence from employees, customers, partners and data create and sustain a successful execution culture and create a great place to work.
Social business software is clearly on the move. Welcome to Palo Alto Jive HQ.
[Crossposted on Silicon Angle on 5/27/2010]
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I completely agree with this article. absolutely. I think that some people don’t realize how beneficial collaboration can be, which is why they don’t make room for it in their organizations. Also, they don’t realize just how much work we do in the white space – outside the detailed project plan. That is how work gets accomplished, and that is what needs to be managed and collaborated on the most. Fantastic article.