UBM Puts All Its Business Divisions Onto Jive—And ... · Case Study UBM Case Study Winner—Business Impact Award JiveWorld ‘09 UBM plc is a leading global business media company.

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© 2015 Jive Software, Inc. All rights reserved | Jive Confidential

Case Study

UBMCase Study

Winner —Business Impact Award JiveWorld ‘09

UBM plc is a leading global business media

company. We inform markets and bring

the world’s buyers and sellers together at

events, online, in print and provide them

with the information they need to do

business successfully.

We focus on serving professional

commercial communities, from doctors to

game developers, from journalists to jewelry

traders, from farmers to pharmacists around

the world. Our 6,000 staff in more than 30

countries are organized into specialist teams

that serve these communities, helping them

to do business and their markets to work

effectively and efficiently.

UBM Puts All Its Business Divisions Onto Jive—And Transforms the Company’s Culture

UBM’s initiative to operate as “one company” while maintaining the

autonomy of its business units ultimately led to a significant change

in the company’s culture. UBM went from a federated company with

divisional and functional silos to one with a UBM-wide employee

Social Business network, powered by Jive, where transparency and

collaboration reign. And it’s paid off in concrete terms both for the

company, with tangible business benefits, and the people who

work for UBM, who can’t imagine doing business any other way.

Business Trigger: The Need To Leverage Synergies Balancing collaboration with operational independence

UBM operates as a decentralized company with more than a

dozen distinct and autonomous divisional operations, primarily in

Europe, Asia and North America. UBM is disciplined at identifying

acquisitions that will give them a strong return on investment.

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Case Study

However, it was clear to management that many

business synergies were going untapped. Many

of UBM’s divisional staff executed similar tasks

and projects; they just happened to be operating

in different industries or geographies. The

decentralized nature of the organization, coupled

with an under-integrated IT structure (itself a

result of completing more than 80 acquisitions

in five years) made it extremely difficult for UBM

employees to connect with peers in different

locations and business units in order to share their

business experience and expertise.

Model For Driving Business Change“CEO sponsorship = artillery and air cover”

UBM first encountered social software at an

executive offsite, where 100 of UBM’s most senior

executives used wiki technology to capture the

dialogue that was taking place. This, they said, is

just what we need to continue our dialogue when

we return to our respective offices. However, the

excitement and energy about the wiki technology

soon died down. In retrospect the issue was

two-fold. The technology wasn’t very easy to use

and, without someone or some event driving the

process, usage dwindled.

But CEO David Levin believed Social Business

could work given the right setup and support. He

charged two executives, David Michael in IT and

Jenny Duvalier in People & Culture, with finding a

better-fitting software and a community manager

to ensure adoption of it.

“Today UBM has embraced this new,

digitally focused world with, among

other things, an online [community]

platform…It’s just one more sign that

management and traditional

publisher lines of communication

that run up and down the corporate

structure have been overwhelmed by

a new type of interaction that is peer-

to-peer. This new communication is

faster. It is more intuitive. And it will

change our business profoundly.”

David Levin

CEO

UBM

“Even as awareness by employees

of the vast diversity and scope

of UBM’s businesses is growing,

UBM overall is coming to feel like

a smaller, friendlier, more cohesive

place as connections spread and

strengthen across organizational and

geographical boundaries.”

Ted Hopton

Community Manager

UBM

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Case Study

Why Jive?“Easy to use yet feature rich”

David Michael saw a demo of Jive at UBM’s

own Web 2.0 conference and the appeal was

obvious. He had a sandbox set up for testing and

quickly concluded Jive could meet UBM’s needs.

Jenny found their new community manager, Ted

Hopton, leading a customer-facing community

and advocating the use of internal wikis in one of

UBM’s recently acquired businesses. Things moved

quickly from there with just the small team of three.

“We had already researched a number of other

social media and wiki products,” says Ted. “It didn’t

take a formal process or an RFP to know that what

Jive offered was superior. It was easy to use yet still

feature rich. Our evaluation took the form of severely

kicking the tires of the Jive platform during a pilot to

make sure it delivered as promised.”

The secure online community powered by Jive

is UBM’s first corporate-wide software solution.

UBM reports that evangelizing success from

the top down and bottom up, plus getting the

technology right, were critical to getting 80% of

their employees connected within 12 months,

driving initiative and inspiring innovation. This led

to benefits to the top and bottom line.

Driving Teamwork in Real Time When the volcanic ash crisis struck Europe

in 2010 (after a long, dormant volcano

erupted in Iceland), UBM employees used

blogs, discussions and even created a new

group spontaneously to share information,

assess risks and identify opportunities.

These personal connections quickly had

a business impact. Within days, UBM

launched a revenue-producing webinar

about the volcanic ash crisis, drawing upon

the expertise and connections of UBM staff

across multiple divisions and countries.

While Jive-powered connections during

the volcanic ash crisis morphed into

a UBM webinar. Doing business on a

social platform transcends the bottom

line, emphasizes Tracy Maurer, system

administrator for the Jive platform. “Jive

is about humanizing and connecting with

other employees. It has helped me feel like

a valuable part of the whole rather than an

expendable resource. I have been able to

connect with people I’ll never meet, maybe

never even talk to. But because of their

shared stories and experiences, I am able to

care more about this job and this company.

This degree of humanization leads to more

employee loyalty and a stronger desire to

help the company prosper—and that’s what

drives Jive’s impact on the bottom line.”

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Case Study

Jive Drives Business Value Across The BoardTangible as well as intangible measures

UBM has documented concrete business value and

a transformed corporate culture that maps to their

business objectives for the platform: information

sharing and collaboration across divisional and

functional silos to make the company, as a whole,

more effective and efficient.

• Efficiency and effectiveness. Nearly half of UBM’s employees report time savings and improved effectiveness in working with others, and more than half find information faster or more easily.

• Locating and negotiating with suppliers. Some of the more tangible measures have been hard savings, where teams have shared information about suppliers to locate the best ones in a region and join together to negotiate better terms. With hundreds of offices and events around the world and no central support team, more effective connecting and sharing now takes place in Jive.

• Innovation. UBM estimates that 7% to 10% of usage has driven new innovation in the business leading to top or bottom-line growth. More than a third of UBM’s employees cite changes in business approaches or strategies, as well as development of new business opportunities, as a result of using the technology.

• New business development. UBM’s divisions have teamed up online to win business they couldn’t have developed as rapidly and smoothly before, such as launching a $100,000 new annual awards event across three different companies and time zones.

• Driving initiative. A number of groups have formed around functions and expertise, such as SEO and mobile applications, and now have hundreds of virtual staff, most of whom have never met and would not have known of each

other otherwise. They exchange best practices, compare vendors, ask and answer questions and even offer training sessions for each other—all

without any management involvement.

Evolving A New CultureSignificant changes in the way people work

Today, after nearly three years of connecting,

communicating and collaborating, UBM is evolving

into a different company. Ted reports that a

comparison of user survey data from 2010 to 2009

confirms what they have been observing anecdotally

for some time now: Jive is contributing to significant

changes in the way people at UBM work, including

cultural shifts in perceptions and attitudes. Nearly

every comparison between 2010 and 2009 indicates

movement in the right direction, says Ted. In addition

to the examples cited earlier, the most significant

benefits reported by employees from using Jive are:

• I’m better connected to my colleagues and/or the organization (61%)

• I’m better informed and stay in communication with others (64%)

• I use the wiki [their name for Jive] to work collaboratively with colleagues (61%)

• I’ve learned useful things I otherwise would not have known about (74%)

• I’ve learned about other parts of UBM and what they are doing (77%)

• I have a better overall understanding of UBM as a business (71%)

• I feel more empowered (46%)

• I’ve made suggestions and raised new ideas (44%)

Jive is the leading provider of modern communication and collaboration solutions

for business. For more information, visit www.jivesoftware.com

Jive At Work For UBM Broad and growing range of use cases

UBM launched their community with a strong belief

in the power of emergent technology to create value

as the community grows. UBM’s broad and growing

use cases generally fall into these categories:

• Improving executive communication and reach

• Collaborative conference and tradeshow planning

• Collaborative product-launch planning

• Collaborative website design

• Transparent workflow

• Increasing strong and weak-tie connections across divisional and geographical boundaries

• Building bonds among employees with non-work groups

• Coordination and collaboration among management teams

• Encouraging ideation

• Rapid sharing of breaking news

Next steps for the Jive platform include adding the

Microsoft Office Connector and Ideation modules

as well as upgrading to Jive 5.

The Future is So Bright I Have to Wear Shades That quote from Ted Hopton is so

compelling, we had to put it in a headline.

In his Adventures in Social Media blog Ted

describes the upside potential of Social

Business as “huge” in terms of company-

wide efficiency, cost reduction and revenue

generation. “There is no denying that our

company is a fundamentally different place

than it was before we launched our Social

Business initiative. Not only is it successful

beyond our wildest imagination, we can’t

imagine getting business done without it.”

In another blog, Ted describes the Jive

platform in these terms: “It’s like a machine

that our CEO can reach into and pull on

levers to make things happen within our

organization. The CEO [David Levin] wrote

a blog post about our mobile strategy and

plans, citing some successful examples.

He linked to a group in our community

that’s all about mobile and suggested that

everyone working on mobile should list

what their projects are so we can coordinate

across the enterprise, share ideas and best

practices, and learn from each other. Presto!

A document was created in that mobile

group and people added their initiatives

to it…The document has grown into an

invaluable resource for everyone across

the company who is working on or thinking

about anything mobile.”