Why Appirio issued Jawbone fitness monitors to employees

CITE World

There are plenty of consumer tools that jump to mind as useful for boosting productivity at work. Smartphones, tablets, and apps like Evernote and DropBox.

How about fitness monitors? Appirio thinks so.

It has issued Jawbone UP monitors to 200 employees as part of an internal fitness and wellness program and said that benefits include increased productivity and employee satisfaction as well as the more tangible insurance savings.

Appirio is working with Jawbone on new features that will let it aggregate user data as well as tie corporate information into the Jawbone dashboard. In about a month it expects to have completed integration that will feed Jawbone data into Salesforce and Chatter, also.

The roots of the initiative go back to the very start of the company.

“We’ve always had an athletic and competitive culture,” said Chris Barbin, co-founder and CEO of Appirio, a seven-year-old business with around 700 employees who help enterprises migrate to public cloud services. From the start, the company would coordinate activities like working toward marathons.

Earlier this year, however, the company decided to formalize its fitness activities into a new program. Dubbed CloudFit, it includes offering employees Jawbone UP fitness monitors and hiring a “virtual trainer” who uses Chatter to set workouts, offer advice on nutrition and offer encouragement...

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One in five people think Google Glass should be banned

CITE World

...It sounds like wearable devices aren’t being very widely used in the enterprise, yet. The study found that 6 percent of respondent businesses in the U.S. and U.K. are providing wearable technology devices for employees. It only gave one example of how though – Appirio, a cloud services provider, has an opt-in program where employees can track health information using the Jawbone UP. Surely there will be additional applications that could be useful to businesses as new devices hit the market...

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It's the end of the CIO as we know it

CITE World

The role of the Chief Information Officer is changing as fast as the IT landscape. Between BYOD, the tidal wave of big data metrics, the shift to the cloud, cost pressures, and any of the other thousand dozens of things that have shifted in IT over the last decade, the CIO's job is no longer so cut-and-dried.

Last night, I sat in on a debate between Narinder Singh, Chief Strategy Officer of cloud service provider Appirio (and Jay-Z enthusiast - he quoted the rapper several times during the evening), and R. Ray Wang, Principal Analyst and CEO of Constellation Research, as they discussed the changing nature of the C-Suite  in general and the CIO in particular with moderator Chris Preimesberger, editor of eWeek...

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Virgin America used Salesforce Chatter to revamp its ancient intranet, and employees love it

CITE World

...Virgin America's mission is to "make flying good again," and that means a rock star experience for customers.

But for Virgin America's employees, that showmanship didn't always translate to the behind-the-scenes intranet experience. It took VXConnect, a custom employee portal built by systems integrator Appirio on top of the Salesforce.com Chatter social platform, to unify the airline's cross-continental workforce under the company's banner, says Amy Cisneroz, Program Manager at Virgin America.

Most of Virgin America's 2,700 employees operate remotely from the airline's Burlingame, CA headquarters -- working as gate agents, pilots and flight attendants all over the country (and beyond). Getting documentation, company resources, or essentially any information to this remote workforce required the use of an ugly, eight-year-old content management system (CMS) that only pushed data out, never pulled it in, and which was a pain to use besides, Cisneroz says.

Worst of all, there wasn't even a rudimentary mobile version of this intranet, meaning that Virgin America employees couldn't so much as log in from their smartphones and tablets.

Cisneroz's background in acting as a liaison between IT and management made her the natural choice to oversee the modernization of Virgin America's intranet -- which meant getting a full-immersion course in the cloud. When Cisneroz first joined Virgin America in mid-2011, she jokes that all she knew about the matter was that "clouds were in the sky."

She consulted both executives and employees alike, trying to get a sense for what they expected from an employee portal. Even Verizon, a Virgin America business partner, had some input on how best to go about it. Predictably, the major theme was that everybody wanted access from their iPhones and Android phones, in addition to a generally more user-friendly experience.

The company audited solutions from social business provider Jive and human resources management solution developer Saba Systems, but Virgin America executives eventually decided to purchase licenses for Salesforce.com Chatter, the SaaS giant's much-touted social enterprise platform (perhaps not a huge surprise, given Sir Richard Branson's friendly relationship with Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff).

Interestingly, Microsoft SharePoint was barely even considered for this undertaking. Cisneroz says that the team was looking for something really new and cool -- tapping Microsoft for this project would hardly be worth the effort of replacing the legacy CMS.

"Everything we do is big and over the top," Cisneroz says, and going with the established marketplace leader for internal collaboration would be too much like following the herd for Virgin America's taste.

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