How Symbolic Systems and Jive are supporting the Department of Defense.

Transcript

My name is Todd Miller. I work for Symbolic Systems as a small contractor for the US military, and my company provides technology solutions. So, the Department of Defense is huge, you’ve got major military services, all doing their own thing. Sometimes they’re collaborating, sometimes they’re not. So how do you get all those people together? One of the ways that we use Jive is to be able to kind of knock down all these geographical boundaries that are set up, and all these divides that people have set up, whether it be an organization or whether it be a service, and just connect people across and flatten it out.

I mean, I don’t believe you should ever train on any technology. And frankly, if you look back at a lot of what’s done and what’s been done in the past, it’s just this massive training loop of people having to go to sessions, and go to training. And that’s actually one of the reasons why we did what we did. Because we felt like, “Hey, you know, I don’t have to train on Facebook. I don’t have to train on how to use social networking. Why the heck would I need to train on something that I’m using every day in business?” So the best thing that I can say about Jive is that people like using it. It’s easy to use, and you don’t have to go out there and waste time putting them in a training course.

And traditionally the Department of Defense has been “need to know.” And so everyone knows, When you join and you work for the military, you support the military in some  way, it’s “need to know.” There’s a big shift that is now kind of pushing to “need to share,” and that’s really where we fit in, and that’s where Jive fits in. And with  this solution there are folks at the highest levels saying, “Hey, no, we need to share. We need to share not only with our services, but we need to be able to share with our academic partners, and we need to be able to share with our coalition forces.” And we view people as the platform [and] as a way to do it, because people are the ones that are implementing those things. And frankly the problem is that many of them don’t know somebody else is doing something else. And you might have that problem at a company level, but think about it at a DOD level, how incredibly large that is. And we’re able to kind of just knock it all down and say, “Hey, you know, I’m standing up this program and you’re standing up this program, and we should probably work together and not spend a ton of money that we don’t need to.”