This document promotes a social intranet solution from Jive Software. It summarizes that traditional intranets focused only on content without enabling collaboration, but social intranets add social features like profiles, groups, activity streams. This turns employees into information curators and addresses challenges like inefficient searching and information silos. Social intranets drive cross-department collaboration and have proven successful for customers like Alcatel-Lucent, Bupa, and CSC in boosting productivity, engagement, and information sharing. Jive offers an all-in-one social intranet solution with features for mobile access, Outlook integration, and prescriptive services.

1. For VP of Corporate Communications, Chief People Officer, VP of Social, VP of HR, CIO , CTO, CEO
social intranet
The intranet is dead.
Long live the social intranet.
www.jivesoftware.com

2. | social intranet
02
The intranet is dead. Long live the social intranet.
Remember the promise of the intranet? Back in the mid-1990s when intranets were born, they were touted as an
antidote to many of the ills that plagued corporate knowledge-sharing.
They were going to liberate content and spread the Content without context • The inordinate cost of keeping employees informed,
wealth locked inside information repositories, closed trained, and aligned.
networks, siloed file systems, and even physical Where did traditional intranets go wrong? For starters,
Mergers and acquisitions only make these problems
file cabinets. And to be fair, intranets were a huge they are centered around content, without the all-
worse, erecting new barriers to communication,
improvement over those older systems. Adopting the important human context. They serve as storehouses for
efficiency, and cultural cohesion. Again, traditional
then-new graphical web paradigm, they made it easier documents and other resources, but really don’t facilitate
intranets (or multiple intranets resulting from M&As)
for everybody to seek and, much of the time, find. interaction, sharing, and collaboration. The flow is one-
do little to help.
way: designated individuals post content, the rank-and-file
But something happened on the way to info nirvana. consumes it (if they ever see or find it). What gets posted
As intranet content accumulated, it became harder to and the way it’s organized too often fails to match the
“The intranet needs to be turned
locate and increasingly outdated. The pace of business actual needs and work patterns of the users themselves. into an ‘information broker platform’
sped up and other technologies raced ahead, while
intranets remained stuck in place. Fast-forward to Here’s one clear indication of how far short intranets
where information is freely and easily
now, and intranets are widely perceived as part of the have fallen: Surveys show that the most-used created, aggregated, shared, found
problem, not the solution. collaborative tool in many organizations is still email, a and discovered at minimal effort.
nearly prehistoric technology by today’s standards.
“A survey by Forrester Research Such an intranet gives everybody
from 2009 shows that just 43% of
The upshot is that, despite a hefty investment in access to all information which is
intranets, companies are still struggling with the same
enterprise employees access an old challenges they’ve faced for decades:
available and make room for virtually
intranet every day. Worse, 35% infinite amounts of information.”
• Way too much time spent looking for the information
don’t even use their intranet on a and expertise needed to get work done. —Why Traditional Intranets Fail Today’s Knowledge
Workers, Oscar Berg, The Content Economy
monthly basis.” • Untold hours of duplicated effort and reinventing of
wheels, slowing innovation, decisionmaking, and the
—Why Your Company’s Intranet is Failing, time it takes to bring new ideas to market.
ReadWrite Web, September 26, 2011
© 2012 Jive Software. All rights reserved.

3. | social intranet
03
Introducing the social intranet • Sharing of documents, files, and other content • Corporate communications: The top-down
dissemination of information across the company.
Intranets may be broken, but the good news is that there’s • Global search aided by social graph analytics
Executives can address new initiatives and company
a fix. Social Business technology supplies the essential • Tools for social connection: user profiles, blogs, outlook in blog posts. HR can distribute onboarding
functionality missing from conventional intranets and status updates, @mentions, following, social materials, training videos, and benefits information.
turns them into the dynamic collaborative environments bookmarks, tags Corporate communications can alert employees of
known as social intranets. Crucially, there’s no need to rip upcoming events.
• Integrations with existing enterprise systems
and replace your old intranet. A robust social platform can
and applications, such as customer relationship • Cross-department, cross-organizational
accommodate all the content currently hosted by your ex-
management (CRM), content management systems collaboration: This is the type of collaboration that
isting environment (either by integrating with the systems
(CMS), and desktop applications spurs innovation and connects people to information
in place or by housing the existing content if you prefer
to move it), so there’s nothing lost in the bargain. A social • Enterprise-level controls for security, privacy, and experts outside of their team. For example,
solution simply adds people to the mix, enabling them permissions, and compliance customer service teams could tap product engineers
to work with content and each other in a way that makes to resolve customer issues. Marketing can collaborate
Whereas traditional intranets rely on a few people to with product development around new feature ideas.
information and expertise much more accessible, useful, curate content and keep everyone informed, social
transparent, and relevant. intranets turn everyone into curators and stakeholders, • Team and departmental collaboration: For example,
collectively ensuring that information is up-to-date, rel- marketing teams coordinating product launches,
Note that we’re talking here about a full-featured,
evant, and brought to the attention of those who need it. sales teams pursuing deals, R&D collaborating on
enterprise-scale social platform, not the simple micro-
Social intranets serve as hubs of interactivity and team- product development, and service teams solving
blogging apps, wikis, and other point solutions that play
work—what intranets were always supposed to be, but customer issues.
in the collaborative and social spaces. A serious social
platform goes well beyond these limited tools and pro- never were. Productivity is greatly enhanced, and so, too,
are organizational solidarity and company culture, creat- And as for those longstanding challenges mentioned
vides a rich range of capabilities such as:
ing a sense of shared purpose and heightened morale. earlier? Social intranets address all of them:
• Discussions and comment strings
• They enable employees to find information and
• Private and public groups and spaces, where specific Three types of collaboration know-how much more rapidly than ever before.
teams work together It’s not just that social intranets provide automated
Social intranets drive three types of collaboration at
• Collaborative document creation and editing search capabilities­ they turn people into a powerful
—
different levels of the organization:
search resource, guiding each other to information
© 2012 Jive Software. All rights reserved.

4. | social intranet
04
proactively and far more precisely than any search slashing the time it takes to find information. environments while still participating fully in the
engine. social intranet
LivePerson’s Jive-powered LivePerson Nation provides
• Social intranets capture and spread the best ideas, a virtual gathering place and workspace for the com- • Intelligent recommendations and filtered activity
speeding innovation, decisionmaking, and response pany’s globally distributed employees. It was recently streams, alerting users to the information most
times across the organization. named “One of the world’s ten best intranets” by the important to their work
• They eliminate duplication and make ideation an Nielsen Norman Group. • The Jive Apps market, so you can extend functionality
additive process, with each participant moving the using pre-built, easy-to-install apps
T-Mobile uses Jive to engage tens of thousands of
ball forward. And they eliminate much of the burden
employees across their engineering, contact center, and • Video sharing
and expense of keeping employees onboarded,
sales teams. In one instance they saved $100 million And when we say “everything you need,” we mean
informed, and aligned.
by using Jive to collaborate and coordinate activities everything. We’re even including prescriptive services
around a recent product launch. Those are just a few of and consulting to make sure you have a smooth rollout,
Demonstrated success the customer successes we could name. swift adoption, and rapid, measurable benefits.
Social intranets really work. They’re really working
Making it easy: Jive’s Social Intranet Solution What are you waiting for? To learn more about how
for an array of Jive customers, who’ve achieved some
Social Business is revolutionizing intranets, check out
remarkable results by making their intranets social.
Here’s the best news of all: Jive is making it easier than the white papers, case studies, and other resources in
Alcatel-Lucent’s Jive-powered social intranet connects ever to make your intranet social and unleash the un- our Social Intranet Toolkit:
more than 50,000 employees around the world, cutting tapped potential of your employees. We’ve put together
a one-stop, packaged solution with all the pieces you http://www.jivesoftware.com/resources/kits/access-
email usage by 50% and reducing the average time it
need, based on Jive’s industry-leading Social Business social-intranet
takes to find answers from hours to minutes.
platform. Our Social Intranet Solution combines the And for more on our complete, ready-to-deploy Social
Bupa has significantly increased information sharing key social capabilities listed above, together with some Intranet Solution, visit our website:
and collaboration among tens of thousands of employ- special features that will make your social intranet even
ees, winning PR Wires’ Corp Comms Digi Award for more powerful, pervasive, and productive. http://www.jivesoftware.com/social-business/solu-
“Best use of digital media in internal communications.” tions/social-intranet
• Anytime, anywhere access via mobile devices
CSC’s Jive-based social intranet has achieved adoption
• Integration with Microsoft Outlook, Office, and
rates approaching 100% among the company’s 95,000-
SharePoint, enabling users to work in familiar
plus knowledge workers, pushing up productivity and
© 2012 Jive Software. All rights reserved.