British Columbia Institute of Technology Testimonial Video

British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT)

CIO Stephen Lamb describes the rapid adoption and swift impact of Jive-n on a large educational institution, enabling 1,800 faculty members to pool their knowledge, speed decision making and bridge traditional academic divides.

Transcript

Hello, my name’s Stephen Lamb. I’m the Chief Information Officer for the British Columbia Institute of Technology in Vancouver, Canada. I work in an institute that has over 42,000 students and 1,800 faculty and staff and I work with a team of around about 100 IT professionals. I’ve been with BCIT for two years and shortly after arriving, it was fairly evident that the institution wasn’t doing a particularly good job of collaborating across the different schools. We looked at Jive as being the solution, and there were a number of reasons why we did that, and one of them was the fact of its maturity in the market space, and according to Gartner’s Magic Quad, “It’s up there as being one of the best in breed within the market.”

Jive is truly an enterprise solution, and that’s very important for me, for a CIO of an organization of my size. So we’ve been live with Jive for six months, and out of the 1,800 faculty and staff we have 1,300 that are engaged and we have about 30% of our community that are in the platform every single day. We’re very surprised by how quickly the Jive platform’s been adopted by our community. And week on week, month on month we’re seeing more and more users engaging in the platform and actually contributing, so that’s great to see. One of the things I saw as CIO when I joined was we had eight or nine different publishing platforms out onto the web, plus two email systems. So our intent as we moved Jive forward would [be to] decommission a lot of those different publishing platforms and centralizing our communication and collaboration through one entry point.

We’re getting more work done, but we’re also getting it done differently. And I think that’s the big value proposition, we’re able to cut out a lot of the waste in our processes. We don’t have to wait for committees to be formed. We don’t need to wait for the funny handshake. We can actually have the work done by the people that need to get it done. Jive really does what it says out of the box. And I didn’t have the time to start to code something, to bend another tool or application to do what I was looking for it to do, which is at its core is leveraging the people in our organization. So Jive is an environment that’s very quick to stand up and actually deploy. And then from there, taking an intuitive approach to fine tune it based on what the community’s actually doing. So it’s a great tool to actually get into the space quickly and deliver on what you actually set out to do.