Go Big Always

Some proof that departments can become “porous”

What’s awesome about having companies using a single, people-centric collaboration system is that you can get a whole new level of visibility of how people work together. That means that companies can, for the first time, see data they’ve never seen before. Chuck mentioned this network value in the case study I wrote up over the weekend but I thought I’d share an example.

A huge part of the goal of social productivity software is to unify a company and allow them to engage with each other to get work done. To achieve this, it requires a change in behaviors, not just buying some software and hoping for the best. I like how Mckinsey refers to this:

To encourage more interaction, innovation, and collaboration, companies must become more porous by continuing to break down barriers to interactions — barriers such as hierarchies and organizational silos. Workers will exchange information if there is a fair return on sharing it and a clear value for seeking it.

How cool is the word “porous?” It perfectly reflects the level of liquidity lacking in our collaboration with each other. Anyway, we recently pulled some reports out of Jive’s own internal Clearspace instance to get a sense of how are working with each other. There’s a ton of insight and I’ll share more in other posts. Note that we’re around 150 employees and have been using Clearspace for a year, but this should be pretty statistically significant. (Big props to Dan Short for pulling this together.)

A look at how departments engage with each other

This shows the relationship between department and space for individual pieces of content. Content created within a common space/department has been removed (e.g. content created in the marketing space by marketing individuals was removed) in order to get a better view of cross-functional hot spots.

I think this chart is interesting for a number of reasons, but I’m particularly struck by the level of interaction between Sales and Professional Services. As the size of the bubble suggests, this is the single most active intersection within Jive (business critical!). The Sales to PS handshake is notoriously problematic for many, many companies. Using Clearspace to support an improved Sales to Implementation process through better cross-functional collaboration has the makings of a great story.

Amount our Sales Department engages with other departments

Similar approach to the above view but in this case the overall size of the pie represents total cross-functional activity within that space and then the individual slices show the contribution of the various departments. This view shows the contribution of the sales organization to the different spaces across Jive (other than sales).

Topics that have the most cross-departmental collaboration

This is way to capture the relationship of all publishing activity across Jive relative to where it is happening. In this case, the size of each block represents total publishing activity within that space and the color shade represents the proportion (percent) of cross-departmental contribution (the darker the shade the greater the proportion of cross-department collaboration). Based on this chart, it appears that Jive collaborates the most around product concepts, product integration, new product ideas, and some other boxes too small to show up.

The cool thing is that we have several partner customers who are giving us access to their dashboard data, too so we’ll be able to learn much more about the patterns and values beyond our own company. This will allow us to develop smarter ROI dashboards and perhaps develop some relevant product features.