1. Jive Software White Paper
Social Business Software
Adoption Strategies

2. Table of Contents
IntroductIon 1
AdoPtIon StrAtegIeS 2
goals & objectives 2
openness 2
Value 3
encouragement 4
Participation 4
Structure 5
content 5
ecosystem 5
usability 6

3. Jive Software White Paper 1
InTroduCTIon
Forrester research predicts that enterprise 2 0 will become a $4 6 billion industry by 2013 and social networking software, like
Social Business Software, will garner the bulk of the money
Many organizations, from small (less than 100 employees) all the way up to global 2,000 companies are considering or have
purchased some form of enterprise 2 0 tool
Beyond the hype, Social Business Software can add some extremely valuable benefits to the enterprise:
Increased collaboration
enhanced Innovation
Increased Productivity
Improved employee relations engagement
Attracting and Keeping Younger Workers
However, we have found that a large number of companies who have implemented enterprise 2 0 technologies in order to learn
more about the solutions available, or to allow smaller teams to collaborate together In many cases, these organizations have
multiple solutions to the same problem, yet each department is unaware of other enterprise 2 0 initiatives happening within
the organization there comes a point where the enterprise needs to take a holistic approach to implementing Social Business
Software
the purpose of this paper is to guide you through the critical areas of Social Business Software adoption there are many non-
technical areas to consider to help drive adoption of the solution, which is vital to the success of the initiative
© 2009 Jive Software All rights reserved

4. 2 Jive Software White Paper
AdopTIon STrATegIeS the stakeholders own the responsibility for defining the
overall purpose of the Social Business Software initiative
Similar to a mission statement, the purpose statement should
summarize the goals objectives of the initiative as well as
goals objectives the benefits to the organization this also helps ensure the
goals are large enough to deliver significant business value,
Having an established and measurable business purpose
but small enough to minimize complexity and ensure fast
is critical to Social Business Software initiative adoption
adoption the purpose statement should also provide a
Focusing on measurable business value, and community
springboard to future growth of the initiative
participation must be considered Spending time on
establishing a set of measurable goals objectives will also one of our customer’s internal community purpose statement
add value in gaining executive sponsorship in addition to is “grow [company name] by enabling our employees to find,
building out a solid business case connect, and learn from each other ” the main goals of the
community is to improve corporate communications, find and
Many of the goals objectives could be based on the value
connect employees, unifying customer experience across all
statements identified earlier in this paper However, your
locations and resolve content publishing process inefficiencies
organization may have other business areas that would benefit
with the current Intranet
from Social Business Software technologies and practices
determine what these are and prioritize them as necessary as Based on the activities above, the initiative’s champion should
part of this process have enough information to put together a solid business case
to “sell” to additional stakeholders
A good place to start is to look at current business challenges
and initiatives For example, at Jive, our ceo is focused on
ensuring the culture of openness we started with keeps going
as we grow rapidly one of our main goals with our internal openness
usage of Jive SBS (affectionally called Brewspace, it’s Portland,
one of the potential issues of wide spread adoption is the
and we like microbrews) is to ensure we do not loose that
need for a sense of controlled behavior (status quo) while
culture of openness everyone is encouraged to participate
focusing on allowing innovation and emergent behavior too
and share on Brewspace
restrictive on an environment can have negative affects on the
Keep in mind that not every business goal or challenge can be internal community, but too open of an environment can be a
solved with Social Business Software A common mistake is to barrier to adoption due to feeling of loss of control of personal
assume that throwing a piece of software at an issue is going intellectual property
to solve it
thus, a careful balance between openness and control is
Another place to look in determining goals and objectives are necessary to facilitate a healthy community and to reproduce
around teams or business process within your organization productive behaviors one approach towards accomplishing
that will find value in enhanced collaboration these goals and this goal is to keep rules to a minimum, but have clear
objectives should defined in a way that can be measured guidelines of expected participatory behavior
once you have identified the goals and initiatives, the next to aid in ensuring participatory behaviors, the goals
critical component to any internal initiative is to identify objectives of the initiative should be clearly communicated
stakeholders that can aid in promoting and championing to users of the environment Statements that encourage
the initiative the more stakeholders that represent a cross participation and reward adoption that are aligned with
section of the organization, the better If the stakeholders initiative goals can help
are all from one department, it will be more difficult to sell
developing a set of “social guidelines” is greatly encouraged
the vision to other divisions down the road In most cases
this list of guidelines should list restrictions to help limit
other divisions or departments are looking to solve similar
bad behaviors, but ensure that the impact does not hinder
problems obtaining stakeholder consensus that a holistic
adoption and participation these restrictions could be kept to
approach to implementing Social Business Software across the
organization should make the process much easier
© 2009 Jive Software All rights reserved

5. Jive Software White Paper 3
an absolute minimum to ensure room for emergent behaviors this plan should be created and approved by all stakeholders
and innovation before rolling out the solution
A common place to start is to tie restrictions to existing
corporate policies as long as they apply in today’s social Value
computing constructs Also, processes should be put in place
to identify and mandate behavioral restrictions as needed A fundamental tenet of Social Business Software
implementation is to ensure the users can see and determine
We encourage involving legal and Hr department’s input in immediate value conversely, the users’ participation must
the approval of these guidelines, but understand that both provide value to the solution
departments may have limited knowledge of the Social
Business Software cultural landscape and may need some collaborative environments have a tendency to lead to an
training and education explosion of content Providing easy discovery of this content
will help encourage user productivity and potentially enhance
IBM has published their “Social computing” guidelines for participation
review and usage these guidelines are a great place to start
for your organization: http://www ibm com/blogs/zz/en/ create a plan to help making the discovery of people’s
guidelines html expertise and content as intuitive and transparent as
possible will help facilitate greater levels of participation and
A common failure of most enterprise implementations is conversely increased adoption As part of this plan consider
failing to document an overarching governance plan the how to promote the site location to users as well as the ability
governance plan outlines the administration, maintenance, for users to invite other users into the environment
and support of Social Business Software implementation It
identifies ownership for both business and technical teams, understand the basic approaches to information discovering
defining who is responsible for what areas of the system and tune the environment to make the best use of these
Furthermore it documents the rules for appropriate usage approaches:
of the Social Business Software environments, within the
organization Search is the primary means of locating information the
“google-effect”, while the easiest to implement and utilize may
An effective governance plan ensures the system is managed lead to multiple postings of content if the user doesn’t find
and used in accordance with its designed intent to prevent it what they are looking for within the first couple of pages of
from becoming an unmanageable system the management the search results Apply any corporate language/definitions/
of an enterprise-wide community system involves both a etc that will aid in providing proper search results
strategic, business-minded board to craft rules and procedures
for the use of the system and also a tactical, technically- Finding content via hyperlinks (urLS) is the second common
competent team to manage the routine operational tasks way of discovering information ensure proper training around
that keep the system running users of the system will linking to related content
be empowered by a support and developer community
sponsored by the business leaders rSS is becoming one the more critical Web 2 0 technologies
to help connect information from disparate systems ensure
the primary goals of this governance plan is to: mechanisms are in place for users to subscribe to feeds and
alerts
1 create the people infrastructure to govern and support the
environment Along these same lines, participants will need the ability
to easily notify each other about interesting or relevant
2 document initial governing policies and procedures of the content Information discovery is vital to proving the value
environment of the system Measure the effectiveness of the above
recommendations on a periodic basis to ensure users are able
3 communicate the need for the business to provide support to find and utilize the resources within the system
via people resources
© 2009 Jive Software All rights reserved

6. 4 Jive Software White Paper
encouragement marketing plan in place for promotion as part of the rollout
strategy should be required
In Web 2 0 applications, a significant amount of participation
comes from sharing user interests or hobbies Social Business to encourage full adoption user’s feedback about the
Software participation is more difficult to encourage due to environment must be gathered there must be the ability to
busy workday lives Many users may see to close of a parallel collect, process and respond to participant feedback, ideally
to Web 2 0 technologies and may not naturally gravitate to this within the same collaborative environment Failing to do so
new paradigm will discourage users and lead to potential desire to not use
the solution
Business champions need to have a plan to help encourage
the levels of participation in enterprise social solutions
Smaller experimental or team-centric implementations participation
typically require less focus on encouragement while larger
enterprise initiatives take more nurturing and sustained encouraging participation is a vital aspect of Social Business
growth to make a productive community Software success this tries back to the overall goals of the
implementation If community participation adds no value,
to aid in encouraging usage of the social environment, users then you should look at the business problem and determine
should feel that all contributions/opinions are welcome and if it really requires an enterprise 2 0 solution
that content repurposing and extending is welcome
In determining the anticipated participations levels, you will
Having a plan to help encourage this culture of information need to treat everyone as an author one of the important
sharing vs information hoarding is vital to a successful social factors in participation is to identify, promote, and facilitate
solution Proper leadership and management participation desired authoring behaviors Participation includes authoring,
needs to be planned, especially if the organization has reviewing, rating and commenting
a tendency to focus more on information hoarding An
organizational change management plan might be considered the importance of authoring should explicitly stated as part
to aid in establishing a culture change of the user experience, promotion materials, and training
users should fully understand that participation is vital to the
Suw charman-Anderson, a social software consultant and solutions growth
writer, wrote an article about encouraging adoption by
“fostering grassroots behaviours which develop organically to aid in this process, desired participation characteristics and
from the bottom-up” as well as providing lightweight behaviors should be identified and communicated Key users
techniques to “mandate use of the environment from the top- who will obtain the most value out of the solution can help
down ” identify these behaviors
Business champions should ideally set anticipated and desired there are two ideal levels of participation as stated in
participation levels and have a mechanisms and processes Forrester’s Ladder of Participation: creators and critics critics
in place to measure overall participation and contribution are those who reply, review, or rate content, but do not
recognizing and rewarding desired participation should be initiate the conversation or perform the original authorship
considered of content as creators would Based on these definitions,
organizations should provide guidelines on quality authoring
Another customer has actually created a mascot for their and commenting
internal employee community and members get rewarded
weekly based on their participation and contributions they Prior to rollout, survey the users prior to implementation to
get recognized online within the community as well as having gauge current levels of participation along the Ladder of
a “trophy” of the mascot reside on their desk Participation use these as the initial baseline to measure
increases or decreases in desired participation levels
Promotion of the solution internally is another great way
to encourage participation Having a communication and
© 2009 Jive Software All rights reserved

7. Jive Software White Paper 5
Structure Content
the Social Business Software environment must contain users will not find any value in an empty community
enough structure and organization to ensure that users the community must provide users a reason to visit and
are able to achieve the business purpose of the initiative participate the community must be include critical content
However, organizations must not over-engineer the solution that is consistent with achieving the business purpose and
Instead, provide as minimal of a structure required to promote challenges
usability as it relates to the business purpose Structure should
encourage free-flowing interactions and allow for emergent In addition to content, having an established content
behaviors publishing plan will aid in encouraging participation, and help
achieve business value more quickly
Any knowledge or information based environment will require
some level of structure, but keep in mind that a focus on the to reduce initial authoring overload and minimize user-
user’s activities should be central to this type of solution contributed content requirements, provide “starter” content
Structure should be map to the initiative purpose and scope that users can modify, rather than having to create from
but keep any additional structure down to a minimum beyond scratch
the original purpose
ensure that the content is available and is structured to
there should be an identifiable correlation of the structure support active authoring and editing there is no need to
to encouraging participation by users to meet the objectives upload content that has been stagnate for months/years
of the implementation As the community evolves, from previous collaborative solutions, unless the content will
unnecessary structure must be discouraged the structure receive value by becoming conversational
of the environment should enhance ease of use, encourage
participatory behaviors, promote fast adoption, and ensure Providing examples of good content generation to guide
flexibility of the solution authors helps establish the tone and the types of participation
that is encouraged
gauge current collaborative systems structure, determine
what is working, and more importantly what is not working as Posting content that is easy to read or is interesting or will
part of the structure design process Focus the structure on help generate buzz, will add value to the solution even if the
ways to help facilitate information and knowledge collection business value is small
determine how current employee interaction occurs in the
sharing and codification of information the structure design
should be consistent with current employee participation as ecosystem
long as it is promoting an overall architecture of participation
Avoid a design that is counterintuitive to how employees We have found that adoption will be more difficult if users are
usually interact on a day to day basis required to use another isolated tool, or multiple tools, that
does not integrate with their workday practices or systems
In our first implementation of Brewspace, we set up internal
communities based on department: Marketing, Sales, Point tools or isolated efforts require less integration with
engineering, Hr, etc While we promote a culture of openness, other tools as a requirement for participation, however, these
new employees who haven’t experienced our culture or knew type of initiatives provide a fuzzier snapshot of the potential of
that it was socially acceptable to join in on conversations this type of tool
outside of their department By mimicking our “corporate”
structure we created artificial barriers of participation People Providing an integrated ecosystem must be carefully
felt that since they were not “in” that department, that their considered in order to aid in the adoption and participation
opinion didn’t matter process there are many current behaviors that are tied
explicitly to work habits and processes Identifying these tools
and providing integration to these key systems and data will
aid in the overall adoption process
© 2009 Jive Software All rights reserved

8. 6 Jive Software White Paper
In implementing an internal community for sales professionals, the overall goal and business purpose of the environment
one of our customers was looking to encourage sales reps to utilize the environment as much as possible to allow
collaborate with each other on sales tactics that are working participants to learn and train each other In addition, allow
and not working However, they quickly found out that their participants to provide suggestions around the evolution of
adoption rates were slower than expected After looking at the functionality and the user experience
the conversations, it was determined that the sales reps kept
referring to another site that had a lot of the sales tools and ease of use is controlled through managing the scope and
applications As new users would come into the system, they complexity of the solution the scope of the solution is
would see the conversations pointing back to the old site’s not only to solve the business challenges, but also to aid
content and went directly there they could have increased in encouraging rapid community growth by reducing the
adoption and stickiness by moving the old content into the complexity of the overall implementation
new community
In addition to the end user usability, the level of It knowledge
to encourage adoption, minimize internally competitive and sophistication of the architecture should be understood
systems and accelerate movement off less-effective and considered as part of the implementation (see ecosystem)
collaborative solutions and other experimental enterprise 2 0 If the scope of the implementation involves multiple
software (standalone blogs, wikis, etc ) there should be a long integration points, customizations, etc the It organization will
term plan in place to to replace older collaboration system use not be to open to supporting such a complex initiative
with a comprehensive enterprise 2 0 strategy
It stakeholders should perform an inventory of existing point
solutions and other isolated collaboration implementations
within the enterprise determine which of these could be
replaced with a comprehensive Social Business Software
solution thus reducing the amount of information aggregation
that would be required
usability
While ease of use can be a relatively a straightforward concept,
About Jive Software
Jive Software is the global leader in Social Business Software
many internal implementations lose sight of this from a
Built with the best features of collaboration software,
feature/functionality standpoint Many organizations have
community software, and popular social applications, Jive
a tendency to add additional features as quickly as possible
revolutionizes how work gets done in the global enterprise by
in order to attempt to add more value to the solution this
enabling businesses to connect and capitalize employee and
tendency to “boil the ocean” must take a second seat to ease
customer conversations
of use and wide spread adoption In addition, subsequent
additions of functionality must be carefully mapped to the
thousands of customers, including 15% of the Fortune 500,
overall business goals and objectives If the feature does not
rely on Jive to solve critical challenges in Marketing and
help address the business challenges, it should not be used
Sales, Hr, Support and rd Jive was founded in 2001 and is
headquartered in Portland, or
the Social Business Software environment should be
simple, intuitive and require minimal user training the user
Jive Software
experience should be designed to bring participants up to
915 SW Stark St
speed quickly on the goals of the solution as well paint a
Suite 400
picture on how the community should evolve with continued
Portland, or 97205
usage
1-877-495-3700 (u S )
Instead of formal classroom training, online guidance should
503-972-6143 (International)
be available to assist in providing users an understanding of
Fax: 503-961-1047
© 2009 Jive Software All rights reserved