Jive Execs: Technology Overload Is Preventing Collaboration

As well as ‘powering human connection’ and discussions around the future of work, one of the key themes at JiveWorld 2017 in Las Vegas was how the prevalence of technology has hindered workplace productivity.

There are now so many different apps, platforms and systems on offer that employees are being “overloaded” with tech which, rather than being a benefit, can actually get in the way.

This was the message from Jive executives during the conference’s opening keynote, where the focus was on integrating these disparate technologies together to boost collaboration in the enterprise.

Tech overload

“Apps are coming out everywhere, everything in technology is available in the palm of our hand,” said Jive’s CEO Elisa Steele. “And it’s supposed to make life easier, it’s supposed to give our business a stronger proposition for productivity, but it’s been really hard as technology becomes more accessible.

“All of us as human beings are more overloaded than ever before. There’s so much going on so how do you make sense of it all? As technology becomes available to us we just create more volume, whether its apps, messages, infrastructure, data, people, there’s volume everywhere.”

Ofer Ben-David, executive vice president of products and engineering at Jive, echoed this thought, explaining that the prevalence of technology in today’s business world has made collaboration much more complex than ever before.

“If you think about the network you are using today to do your job, it is far more complex and bigger than it used to be in the past. A lot more people and connections, applications and content across different functions and geographies.

“We have so much new technology that should help us to communicate and collaborate, but in many ways that’s exactly where the problem is. We have so many applications that are supposed to help us collaborate, the data is spread across the enterprise.”

The main issue is the lack of consistency. A lot of the time, employees from different functions and from different teams all use a different set of tools, which makes enterprise-wide collaboration a serious challenge.

This fragmentation makes access to content much more difficult, especially when employees tend to stick to their favourite apps and the number available continues to grow.

As Jive’s vice president of project management Hunter Middleton put it, “the more apps that are out there, the more fragmentation that exists. We all have our favourite apps that we love to use and find comfortable, but not everyone is using the same ones and when we need to expand our work to collaborate with other people we need easy access to each other’s content.”

The solution

The answer, according to Jive, is a platform that unifies all of these different apps and systems currently spread across enterprises, providing a central location for employees to find both content and people.

It’s all about “simplicity, ease of use and bringing things together in a way that is personalised, contextual and relevant to who you are and what you’re trying to do,” said Steele.

In a nutshell, the solution to the problem involves “connecting the networked ecosystem”, which Jive believes is on its way to achieving through its Collaboration Hub.

Described by Ben-David as “a central place to collaborate openly and securely across platforms, geographies, customers and partners”, the Jive Collaboration Hub brings together three key concepts: Connections, collaborations and intelligence.

Learn more about Jive’s strategy on page 2…