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work better together TM
© 2015 Jive Software, Inc. All rights reserved | Jive Confidential
Case Study
UBMCase Study
Winner —Business Impact Award JiveWorld ‘09
UBM plc is a leading global business media
company. We inform markets and bring
the world’s buyers and sellers together at
events, online, in print and provide them
with the information they need to do
business successfully.
We focus on serving professional
commercial communities, from doctors to
game developers, from journalists to jewelry
traders, from farmers to pharmacists around
the world. Our 6,000 staff in more than 30
countries are organized into specialist teams
that serve these communities, helping them
to do business and their markets to work
effectively and efficiently.
UBM Puts All Its Business Divisions Onto Jive—And Transforms the Company’s Culture
UBM’s initiative to operate as “one company” while maintaining the
autonomy of its business units ultimately led to a significant change
in the company’s culture. UBM went from a federated company with
divisional and functional silos to one with a UBM-wide employee
Social Business network, powered by Jive, where transparency and
collaboration reign. And it’s paid off in concrete terms both for the
company, with tangible business benefits, and the people who
work for UBM, who can’t imagine doing business any other way.
Business Trigger: The Need To Leverage Synergies Balancing collaboration with operational independence
UBM operates as a decentralized company with more than a
dozen distinct and autonomous divisional operations, primarily in
Europe, Asia and North America. UBM is disciplined at identifying
acquisitions that will give them a strong return on investment.
2© 2015 Jive Software, Inc. All rights reserved | Jive Confidential
Case Study
However, it was clear to management that many
business synergies were going untapped. Many
of UBM’s divisional staff executed similar tasks
and projects; they just happened to be operating
in different industries or geographies. The
decentralized nature of the organization, coupled
with an under-integrated IT structure (itself a
result of completing more than 80 acquisitions
in five years) made it extremely difficult for UBM
employees to connect with peers in different
locations and business units in order to share their
business experience and expertise.
Model For Driving Business Change“CEO sponsorship = artillery and air cover”
UBM first encountered social software at an
executive offsite, where 100 of UBM’s most senior
executives used wiki technology to capture the
dialogue that was taking place. This, they said, is
just what we need to continue our dialogue when
we return to our respective offices. However, the
excitement and energy about the wiki technology
soon died down. In retrospect the issue was
two-fold. The technology wasn’t very easy to use
and, without someone or some event driving the
process, usage dwindled.
But CEO David Levin believed Social Business
could work given the right setup and support. He
charged two executives, David Michael in IT and
Jenny Duvalier in People & Culture, with finding a
better-fitting software and a community manager
to ensure adoption of it.
“Today UBM has embraced this new,
digitally focused world with, among
other things, an online [community]
platform…It’s just one more sign that
management and traditional
publisher lines of communication
that run up and down the corporate
structure have been overwhelmed by
a new type of interaction that is peer-
to-peer. This new communication is
faster. It is more intuitive. And it will
change our business profoundly.”
David Levin
CEO
UBM
“Even as awareness by employees
of the vast diversity and scope
of UBM’s businesses is growing,
UBM overall is coming to feel like
a smaller, friendlier, more cohesive
place as connections spread and
strengthen across organizational and
geographical boundaries.”
Ted Hopton
Community Manager
UBM
3© 2015 Jive Software, Inc. All rights reserved | Jive Confidential
Case Study
Why Jive?“Easy to use yet feature rich”
David Michael saw a demo of Jive at UBM’s
own Web 2.0 conference and the appeal was
obvious. He had a sandbox set up for testing and
quickly concluded Jive could meet UBM’s needs.
Jenny found their new community manager, Ted
Hopton, leading a customer-facing community
and advocating the use of internal wikis in one of
UBM’s recently acquired businesses. Things moved
quickly from there with just the small team of three.
“We had already researched a number of other
social media and wiki products,” says Ted. “It didn’t
take a formal process or an RFP to know that what
Jive offered was superior. It was easy to use yet still
feature rich. Our evaluation took the form of severely
kicking the tires of the Jive platform during a pilot to
make sure it delivered as promised.”
The secure online community powered by Jive
is UBM’s first corporate-wide software solution.
UBM reports that evangelizing success from
the top down and bottom up, plus getting the
technology right, were critical to getting 80% of
their employees connected within 12 months,
driving initiative and inspiring innovation. This led
to benefits to the top and bottom line.
Driving Teamwork in Real Time When the volcanic ash crisis struck Europe
in 2010 (after a long, dormant volcano
erupted in Iceland), UBM employees used
blogs, discussions and even created a new
group spontaneously to share information,
assess risks and identify opportunities.
These personal connections quickly had
a business impact. Within days, UBM
launched a revenue-producing webinar
about the volcanic ash crisis, drawing upon
the expertise and connections of UBM staff
across multiple divisions and countries.
While Jive-powered connections during
the volcanic ash crisis morphed into
a UBM webinar. Doing business on a
social platform transcends the bottom
line, emphasizes Tracy Maurer, system
administrator for the Jive platform. “Jive
is about humanizing and connecting with
other employees. It has helped me feel like
a valuable part of the whole rather than an
expendable resource. I have been able to
connect with people I’ll never meet, maybe
never even talk to. But because of their
shared stories and experiences, I am able to
care more about this job and this company.
This degree of humanization leads to more
employee loyalty and a stronger desire to
help the company prosper—and that’s what
drives Jive’s impact on the bottom line.”
4© 2015 Jive Software, Inc. All rights reserved | Jive Confidential
Case Study
Jive Drives Business Value Across The BoardTangible as well as intangible measures
UBM has documented concrete business value and
a transformed corporate culture that maps to their
business objectives for the platform: information
sharing and collaboration across divisional and
functional silos to make the company, as a whole,
more effective and efficient.
• Efficiency and effectiveness. Nearly half of UBM’s employees report time savings and improved effectiveness in working with others, and more than half find information faster or more easily.
• Locating and negotiating with suppliers. Some of the more tangible measures have been hard savings, where teams have shared information about suppliers to locate the best ones in a region and join together to negotiate better terms. With hundreds of offices and events around the world and no central support team, more effective connecting and sharing now takes place in Jive.
• Innovation. UBM estimates that 7% to 10% of usage has driven new innovation in the business leading to top or bottom-line growth. More than a third of UBM’s employees cite changes in business approaches or strategies, as well as development of new business opportunities, as a result of using the technology.
• New business development. UBM’s divisions have teamed up online to win business they couldn’t have developed as rapidly and smoothly before, such as launching a $100,000 new annual awards event across three different companies and time zones.
• Driving initiative. A number of groups have formed around functions and expertise, such as SEO and mobile applications, and now have hundreds of virtual staff, most of whom have never met and would not have known of each
other otherwise. They exchange best practices, compare vendors, ask and answer questions and even offer training sessions for each other—all
without any management involvement.
Evolving A New CultureSignificant changes in the way people work
Today, after nearly three years of connecting,
communicating and collaborating, UBM is evolving
into a different company. Ted reports that a
comparison of user survey data from 2010 to 2009
confirms what they have been observing anecdotally
for some time now: Jive is contributing to significant
changes in the way people at UBM work, including
cultural shifts in perceptions and attitudes. Nearly
every comparison between 2010 and 2009 indicates
movement in the right direction, says Ted. In addition
to the examples cited earlier, the most significant
benefits reported by employees from using Jive are:
• I’m better connected to my colleagues and/or the organization (61%)
• I’m better informed and stay in communication with others (64%)
• I use the wiki [their name for Jive] to work collaboratively with colleagues (61%)
• I’ve learned useful things I otherwise would not have known about (74%)
• I’ve learned about other parts of UBM and what they are doing (77%)
• I have a better overall understanding of UBM as a business (71%)
• I feel more empowered (46%)
• I’ve made suggestions and raised new ideas (44%)
Jive is the leading provider of modern communication and collaboration solutions
for business. For more information, visit www.jivesoftware.com
Jive At Work For UBM Broad and growing range of use cases
UBM launched their community with a strong belief
in the power of emergent technology to create value
as the community grows. UBM’s broad and growing
use cases generally fall into these categories:
• Improving executive communication and reach
• Collaborative conference and tradeshow planning
• Collaborative product-launch planning
• Collaborative website design
• Transparent workflow
• Increasing strong and weak-tie connections across divisional and geographical boundaries
• Building bonds among employees with non-work groups
• Coordination and collaboration among management teams
• Encouraging ideation
• Rapid sharing of breaking news
Next steps for the Jive platform include adding the
Microsoft Office Connector and Ideation modules
as well as upgrading to Jive 5.
The Future is So Bright I Have to Wear Shades That quote from Ted Hopton is so
compelling, we had to put it in a headline.
In his Adventures in Social Media blog Ted
describes the upside potential of Social
Business as “huge” in terms of company-
wide efficiency, cost reduction and revenue
generation. “There is no denying that our
company is a fundamentally different place
than it was before we launched our Social
Business initiative. Not only is it successful
beyond our wildest imagination, we can’t
imagine getting business done without it.”
In another blog, Ted describes the Jive
platform in these terms: “It’s like a machine
that our CEO can reach into and pull on
levers to make things happen within our
organization. The CEO [David Levin] wrote
a blog post about our mobile strategy and
plans, citing some successful examples.
He linked to a group in our community
that’s all about mobile and suggested that
everyone working on mobile should list
what their projects are so we can coordinate
across the enterprise, share ideas and best
practices, and learn from each other. Presto!
A document was created in that mobile
group and people added their initiatives
to it…The document has grown into an
invaluable resource for everyone across
the company who is working on or thinking
about anything mobile.”