Hi Benjamin,

I don't have any cost/benefit numbers that I can give you. Our overarching objectives are:

Provide a compelling online experience for employees and leaders in which they can connect and share knowledge in new and more relevant ways

• Enhance internal collaboration
• Foster employee dialogue across all employees (including store employees)
• Create a fun, easy to use, social outlet for employees that helps drive employee engagement
• Manage knowledge and facilitate idea sharing/creation
• Streamline internal communications

Our initial implementation is focused on the following:

Employee Engagement (primary target is store employees)

• Connect our employees. Create networks. Enable a community and create a sense of belonging.
• Provide a forum for our employees to collaborate, have authentic dialog, share best practices and generate ideas.
• Provide a platform to capture, exchange, disseminate & rank ideas and information.
• Respond to existing demand (150K fans on Facebook many of whom are employees, 2K+ past and present employees on LinkedIn)

Flexible Work Arrangements

• Provide a collaboration and social networking environment for an increasing pool of remote workers

Ouch watch out for those MS metadata properties... so easy to forget?

Actually our process at CSC (global, 90K employee company) went something like:

Phase One - Tie the Problem to the Business Strategy - Make the Business Case first (not the solution case)

First up is making the business case. Why should the company invest at all in E2.0.  You need buy in on this fundamental step, otherwise any future effort could be questioned.

Do your research first - get every analyst report or expert article you can and quote liberally.

Why is this even important to consider? What benefit does this have and how does it tie to our CSC strategy?  What problems exist in the company that needs solving? Are they strategic? Do they have executive visibility? If so, you'll have an easier selling job on why even engage on this.

Phase Two - Create the Requirements

If your executives agree - you need a good map of what you expect this tool to do. You can't say the solution is Jive without knowing the problems you need to solve. (In our case, we thought the answer would be another solution, by the way, but Phase Three - proved the 'other' solution was clearly weaker). So be sure you have business requirements documented. Be sure you have 'global' input on those requirements.

Phase Three - Evaluation the Solutions

We then of course did the standard vendor evaluation - which meant we had requirements to evaluate against. We got users from around the globe to participate in the evaluation for balanced input and diversity. We engaged on a proof of concept, had the vendors reply to the RFIs, had our evaluators submit all their comments and evaluations.

And at the end of the day . . . And here's my answer . . . I didn't sell Jive. Jive sold itself. If you do your homework, the facts should speak for themselves. Of course it convinced me. But my job was far easier because Jive was the right platform for us and our users said that loud and clear. It outperformed anything we looked at the time.

The more I work with Jive and learn what's up their sleeve, the more I'm convinced they are truly worthy of the Gartner Visionary Quadrant status.

You need to show you've thought about what the requirements are and how it fits into your culture.

Phase Four - Present the Findings - and let the findings speak for themselves

Again, I did not have to sell Jive   (In fact, I was one of the folks that initially thought the 'other' solution would be the answer for our company).The data - the user anecdotes, the user evaluation ratings, and hands on use of a trial - spoke for itself.

Part of any job, of course, needs to include a total picture. So you need to show you understand the costs involved, not only for the licenses but also for the hosting and labor (we did a Total Cost of Ownership for the several solutions we looked at).

And you need to show that the product you select fits your company goals, costs and culture. So map your evaluation results again those criteria. Did it meet your goals? Does it fit your culture?

Other comments

On the culture point, if you don't have a good read on your company culture or politics, nothing you do will be successful. Some companies invest heavily in development and run & maintain. If you have a company like that, they may be more inclined to hear you say you're looking at Open Source options. We knew that we did not have that appetite and convinced our sponsors that a "platform" solution, that didn't require a lot of integration of point solutions, was the suggested path.

I have not genericized my content (as another person in this thread has) so I can't share my work products yet. But hopefully, this gives you some other ideas to think of until I'm able to update my own stuff (a few folks have asked me for my materials - and I need to do that soon).

Our process was very much the same as what Claire has described. IT did the herding of the cats during the evaluation, but it was the business who drove the need, functional requirements and selection of the solution.

One thing your management will definitely ask about is what will be required in terms of support. Benjamin called this out in his deck, and I can't emphsize enough how important it is to take this into consideration up front. You have to know your community and what they are/aren't willing to step up to in terms of support. In our case, our Community Managers who are in the business are very focused on business-specific content, but are not that focused on providing support (i.e answering "how to" questions, creating documents, etc.) so we are having to rely more on IT to do that than we had originally anticipated.

P.S.  CSC is also hosting with Jive. And we, too, are very happy with it.

The only thing I would add is that we made a concerted effort to determine who might have concerns about the use of a tool like Jive (Legal, Regulatory, QUality Assurance, etc.) and to work with them as early as possible to

• Educate them on what we were looking to do and why;
• Listen to any concerns they might have; and
  
• Record and follow up on any issues they raised (with their help and involvement)

This is still a work in progress (we're working on eDiscovery and an Acceptable Use Policy right now), but they've been working with us as partners, not as adversaries.

You're right and of course we have had to do the same, for sure.

We have been working with all the stakeholders you mentioned as well. And folks at Jive are very much aware at all the concerns these stakeholders have

We are running a 'pilot' ourselves. We've achieved acceptance for the pilot and are partnering with all those stakeholders for the next phase. It surely does keep one busy, does it not?!!

Hey Rick,

You were a ROCK STAR at the all day training workshop based on the online survey. I've promised Joe I would send the workshop feedback to you guys.  You were mentioned frequently.  There was another guy who did the advanced track... eh...he didn't have a lab and has a soft voice (uhem) that didn't fare as well as you did. 

Thanks again for the super job you did!

- Wally