One on One with Matt Tucker of Jive Software

Matt Tucker is CTO at Jive Software [1]. He is responsible for the long-term technical and strategic direction of Jive's products. He helped co-found Jive Software in 2001 and has been part of building the company from two people to over two hundred. We asked Tucker how a company like Jive can help facilitate collaboration and knowledge sharing using Enterprise 2.0 tools.

FCM: People talk about the wisdom of the crowd, but can't the crowd also get chaotic? How do you balance the free-flow of ideas with too much information, too many different tags and so forth?

MT: Social software naturally does a fantastic job of helping us find the content that we care about. We connect to and follow the people whose opinions and knowledge we value and that acts as a natural filter. For example, the people I follow on Twitter provide enough of a cross-section of information flow on the Internet that my RSS feed reader has become less important. But noise is a problem, and especially for the social business use-case where there are an enormous number of systems and activity to tie together into a single, unified view. More advanced techniques like recommendation engines and smart filtering are becoming increasingly important and those are big investment areas for Jive.

FCM: I read today about the concept of Personal Knowledge Management--for instance using Evernote to track your favorite articles and websites. How does a platform like Jive facilitate this type of personal information management inside the enterprise, while at the same time allowing this personal information to be part of the public information stream?

MT: We focus most on collaboration and conversation between groups of people, often very large groups. But personal tools absolutely have a role in social applications like Jive. For example, the ability to create private documents or personal bookmarks. The added value to social software over purely personal tools is that as soon as you choose to make your content public, you get immediate additional value, not to mention providing value to others. Take a document--other people comment on it, tag it and even edit it with you if you allow them to. And all of that work gets put into the enterprise activity stream so that the right people can discover it. This is truly a new way for people to get work done together.

FCM: How do you work with content management systems to manage social information and what role does the content management system have in bringing social information to the surface?

MT: An enormous amount of valuable knowledge is locked away in content management systems. CMSs generally have an atrocious user experience and are therefore only used by small pockets of people inside a company. So integrating with the major CMS applications and making it much easier for that content to be consumed and shared with the entire company is a major priority for us with our Jive Connects technology. We focused on SharePoint first and released that integration last year. But we'll be extending that to the other major content systems in the near future.

FCM: How well do you interact with enterprise search tools. Are they designed to help find the type of unstructured tidbits of information found in social communication streams?

MT: Integrating with enterprise search is important. We try to make that as easy as possible by supporting standards like Open Search and have also done several deeper integrations. But social software is also turning the entire notion of search on its head. Activity streams now make it possible for knowledge to find people instead of the other way around. We've all seen how powerful this is in our personal lives. The activity streams in Facebook and Twitter have made us more connected than ever before and much of what I personally find valuable is content that I never would have known to search for. Businesses are just beginning to realize the power of this concept and it will revolutionize the way we get work done.

FCM: What impact do you think SharePoint 2010 will have on a company like yours that is trying to make it as a stand-alone Enterprise 2.0 tool vendor?

MT: It's incredibly validating for our market that Microsoft is investing so much in social features for SharePoint. It's the same story for the social business investments being made by the other major software vendors. We are strongly confident in our ability to compete, for several reasons.

First, SharePoint 2010 isn't even available yet and it will be two years or more before most companies are able to get through the upgrade process. But companies need a social strategy now and Jive is able to greatly improve the value of SharePoint installs today through our integration. Second, a full social business strategy requires engaging with not just employees but also customers and partners in the social web. It's very difficult for applications like SharePoint that have grown up in the internal content management space to reach outside the firewall. Finally, we're continuing to make massive investments in innovation and plan to stay at least two years ahead of every other product out there, including SharePoint.