Bupa community hinges on having a single platform for communication and collaboration

The trigger for Social Business Software

Expansion on a grand scale and a new strategic imperative
It was a perfect storm for Social Business Software: accelerated global expansion and a new business strategy predicated on sharing knowledge across Bupa's 20 business units. Bupa has been steadily acquiring new ventures around the globe, increasing not only its footprint but the range of its offerings, which today includes care homes, health services, and travel as well as insurance.

One of Bupa's top agenda items for the next decade is to make a dramatic shift from being a service provider to becoming a healthcare partner with a comprehensive product suite for every stage. This strategy requires that the company operate as a cohesive and unified global workforce.

"Transparency and collaboration are particularly important to Bupa at this juncture," says Nick Crawford, Channel Manager, Group Internal Communications, Bupa. "Unlocking opportunities and sharing best practices across countries and cultures will be critical to offering a complete suite of offerings in all our markets. "

The business challenge in a nutshell

IT islands and a siloed workforce
Bupa's global expansion led to an archipelago of IT islands with too many people working in silos. Bupa has 12 company intranets due to acquisitions, geographic locations, and organizational divisions. While the intranets provide valuable information and are used on a daily basis, they do little to unite the company to improve processes, spawn innovation, and create a sense of company culture. Email, while widely used, hampers larger conversations and broader awareness of opportunities.

We asked ourselves 'What's the quickest way to remove barriers that would allow us to communicate anywhere, anytime? How can we best work together across multiple countries, time zones, and work sites towards a common goal?" said Nick.

The search for a solution

Overlaying 12 intranets with Jive Social Business Software
Bupa first explored migrating nearly 30,000 pages of content onto a new global intranet that would consolidate their 12 existing intranets. That proposal to the company's Chief Executive Committee (CEC) was rejected as too complex and too costly. "The CEC essentially directed us to go away and come back with something better," says Nick.

What the Bupa Group Internal Communications team came back with was a proposal for a global social business networking and collaboration community based on Jive Social Business Software, a solution that was considerably faster and a fraction of the cost. "The initial cost difference wasn't the primary driver for our recommendation," says Nick. "We were convinced Social Business Software was the right solution for building a sense of commitment and belonging to one company. And a social platform would complement and augment our existing systems with powerful web 2.0 capabilities—a groundswell we can't afford to ignore." The team was also convinced that Jive was the right vendor.

Deployment under a very aggressive timeline

Using the Jive platform to deliver the pilot
In March 2009, the CEC approved the Jive option with one stipulation: let's get this running as a pilot by May and then come back in October and tell us how it's going. An aggressive timeline, to say the least, which the Internal Communications team met using a novel approach. "We took the Jive platform out-of-the-box, rebranded it Bupa Live, put 100 people on it from March through May (International Communications, HR, and IS) and essentially used the Jive platform during that period to collaborate around how to deliver the pilot." The Bupa Live pilot was launched globally in May. "To Jive's credit, the process was pretty easy." The team's goal for the May through October timeframe, Nick confesses, was to make the platform so essential that switching it off in October would be unthinkable. And it was.

Jive meets the company's core requirements

A global space for collaboration and innovation
Bupa's dynamic Jive platform offers forums, discussion groups, polls, blogs, news feeds, video, and document creation and tagging capabilities for communicating, collaborating, and sharing information across business units. In addition, through the Jive platform, Bupa offers:

• A searchable archive of content
• A searchable archive of profiles and skills
• Ability to share video quickly and easily
• Automatic Spanish translation of the interface

Bupa reports dramatic evidence of ROI every day

Increased revenue, cost savings, improved communications and engagement
Daily examples of crowdsourcing and knowledge sharing are reducing duplication of effort and putting an end to business units working and communicating in silos, reports Bupa. Today, thanks to the Jive platform, people are invited to participate in discussions and projects irrespective of business unit, geography, and firewall restrictions. And meetings and teams are put together in seconds now rather than taking the long, slow road through bureaucracy. The results are measurable and dramatic:

• Cost savings from daily efficiencies
  700 users surveyed estimated cost savings that totaled £190,000 (US$305,746) through enhanced collaboration and engagement, which would potentially save the company millions of pounds if extrapolated to all Bupa Live users.
• Revenue from increased sales
  Sales increased by 10% in the B2C Telesales & Telemarketing Group of which "at least 1% or 2% is thanks to the team supporting each other on Bupa Live."
• Software development cost efficiencies
  A Bupa iPhone app took less than half the expected time to develop and saved at least £20,000 (US$32,184) for the Mobile Development Group, who says "We would have never made this kind of progress without Bupa Live."
• Event cost savings
  At Business Forum 2010 at least £36,000 (US$57,931) was saved in content distribution and delegate cascade packs alone, "not to mention the value of opening doors to the whole business in real time for the first time ever, a leap of faith that resulted in an unprecedented level of transparency."
• Cost/time savings in setting up communities of practice
  A process that formerly took IS six weeks and cost requesters more than £2,000 (US$3,218) now takes 20 minutes and does not require IS involvement—or costs.
• Improved global communications
  Bupa Live has become Bupa's primary internal communications channel at the team, departmental, business unit, and global (Bupa Group) levels. Communications range from sharing content from the annual leadership conference to non-delegates and group-wide announcements to an online Bupa magazine and scheduled as well as ad hoc video posts.
• Increased employee satisfaction and engagement
  At Bupa, a 2% increase in connectedness led to a 10% increase in satisfaction. Bupa Live users scored higher than non-Bupa Live users on every single question on the annual employee satisfaction survey in 2010.

Jive at work for internal communications

Greater transparency PLUS £72,000 (approximately US$116,000) savings
The Bupa Business Forum is the company's annual leadership conference, where approximately 300 delegates get together to shape the future of the company. Before implementing Jive, this meeting took place behind closed doors and the leadership relied on individual communication skills to cascade the findings and output of the meeting. Today, thanks to Jive, that meeting is transparent to everyone in the company.

Before the event, a "delegate meeting point" on Bupa Live helps delegates understand the event's purpose, theme, and objectives and kick starts the debate by encouraging delegates to pose questions to the panels. During the event, each session is filmed and broadcast, and the slides and videos are posted on Bupa Live, where employees receive email alerts and updates in real time. Content from the 2010 conference was viewed more than 10,000 times. Employees around the globe made comments, asked questions, and sent out Bupa versions of tweets, microblogs they call "Bleets," about the event. After the event, a 45-minute summary deck was posted on Bupa Live to cascade key messages. What's more, Bupa saved at least £72,000 (approximately US$116,000) in content distribution and delegate cascade packs alone.

"This is a new level of transparency, particularly unusual in the healthcare sector, and Bupa's use of Jive for the business forum has been quite brave," says Nick. "It has had, and will continue to have, a direct impact on people's engagement with Bupa and the company's strategic goals."

Jive at work for the Bupa leadership

Blogging from the top
Bupa's leadership uses Bupa Live to engage with their teams for a wide range of activities, including promoting a new vision or strategy, showcasing key projects, holding "virtual town halls," writing blogs, uploading video diaries, and reaching out to the global Bupa Live community for ideas and answers to queries.

Learn More About Jive

Jive Social Business Software brings the best features of social networking, collaboration software, community software, and social media monitoring to your enterprise.

Download our Social Intranet Resource Kit and learn more about employee collaboration and communication
Watch our video demos and see Jive in action
See all of our case studies