Interactive Intranet Engages Employees And Unleashes Collective Intelligence

When it came to selecting a new intranet, medical software provider Medidata had an ambitious wish list. They wanted to unify and engage their widespread employees, many of whom work remotely. They wanted to build a new sense of team spirit and ignite better collaboration. They wanted to bring together information from diverse systems in one easily searchable hub – and capture knowledge for future re-use.

The result is Medidata Express – a Jive-powered intranet that serves as a gateway to people and knowledge across the organization. It’s how employees connect with colleagues, wherever they are. It’s how they learn what’s going on with their company and teams. It’s where they work together and share expertise. It’s where they quickly find the information they need to collaborate and innovate – whether it resides in Jive or connected systems, including Google Docs, Jira and Confluence. “Jive has really brought Medidata closer together,” says VP Daniel Mudgett. “Across all our different locations we now have one virtual community that we all feel a part of and connect to every day.”

Transcript

At Medidata we wanted people to really connect with each other and collaborate and get to know each other. Even though we have people working across 12 different offices and a third of our workforce working remotely, we wanted to create a sense of team and connectedness. So we sought out a social intranet platform that we could use across the whole company. And there really weren’t a lot of good choices in this space – they didn’t have the kind of collaboration elements and social connectedness that we saw in Jive. So we implemented Jive as “Medidata Express,” which is our social intranet platform that we use across the company to connect, collaborate, work together on all kinds of projects and share all kinds of information and stories.

We really wanted to bring as much information and useful tasks to people, so we went and actually integrated Express with some of our key systems – from our LMS, so when people have training assignments they can access and see them inside of Express, to Jira tickets and Jira tasks that they have assigned them, to a multifaceted search engine that we integrated across a host of platforms including Confluence, Jira, Google Sites and Google Docs. So we can search across all those different repositories right from Jive.

One of the key things we wanted to do was enable people to work mobilely. So we rolled out the Jive mobile app. We’ve had a lot of adoption. People really love the app, and it helps make it so when they’re on the go they can keep up on what’s going on in the company.

Using Jive, we’re building lots of connections and creating lots of information inside the system. All that information and all those “aha moments” are captured and preserved so that down the line everybody in the company can benefit from them.

Jive has really brought Medidata closer together. Across all our different locations we now have one virtual community that we all feel a part of and we all connect every day on the system. It really has made a big difference.