Jive Software is a specialist in enterprise collaboration software. While we predominately think of collaboration tools as a means to connect human employees in the workplace, it might be time to extend our notion of community connectivity to also encompass workflow processes, virtual groups (featuring internal employees and external users) and the machines, sensors and devices that populate the IoT.
Human connections to digital business
In terms of operation, Jive is not intended to replace email. It is a collaboration platform, but it is arguably more sophisticated than a messaging system or some form of electronic to-do list that tracks team projects in some way.
Instead, it presents definable workspace zones, where so-called ‘communities of interest’ are given the option to interact with information, with a layer of analytics running throughout. This then is the Jive Collaboration Hub.
The software itself is based on an open platform and the core chunk of Jive that creates the ‘special sauce’ is accessible via a software development kit (SDK) so, essentially, this means developers can ‘program to’, ‘extract from’ and ‘integrate with’ its total platform.
Jive has used its 2017 Jive World conference and exhibition in Las Vegas to detail the state of its roadmap and explain the structure of its software stack in order for software application developers to be able to understand the state, shape and scope of its architecture. This follows the announcement earlier this week that it is to be acquired by ESW Capital’s Wave Systems for $462 million, to become part of the Aurea group of companies.
Capturing work signals
The Jive Work Graph is a piece of software designed to capture what the company calls ‘work signals’. It is a network visualization, designed to paint a picture of how work items happen and, importantly, be able to track the data and information that that work creates.
So far this all sounds like software designed for human beings, teams, communities, users, customers and partners. But as workplace digitization gathers pace, we can start to extract and use IoT-generated information and push that into the analysis engine. In this way:
- Human job status updates are work signals.
- Human knowledge sharing analysis reports are work signals.
- IoT operations logs are work signals.
Read more: Over the IoT data waterfall, in a barrel
Collaborating with the IoT
The notion of we humans connecting with machines to an ever-greater degree appears to fascinate us. We like to talk about human/computer interaction (or HCI) as a defined and discrete area of software engineering in its own right.
As Jive and others in the enterprise collaboration space now help to digitize the back end of business operations from an initial objective of collaborative connection, we eventually get to a place where machines also join the party and become members of our ‘team’.
So watch out for the laser-driven industrial turbine sensor in the work canteen at lunch. We’ve heard he’s a greedy so-and-so.
Read more: TIBCO CTO: IoT data integration is a full-spectrum rainbow