Procter and gamble business strategy is to keep the popular brands that already exist at the top by maintaining and extending the brands. The role of innovation is to create an existence in new markets from the ground up or improve on brands. Innovation is the centerpiece for the business strategy and can not be done without collaboration. Collaboration is where the rubber hits the ground in terms of accomplishing the goals set through their innovation, which is based on new ideas or what else is occurring in the market. The business model and strategy centers around enriching innovation through collaboration. So collaboration being as quick, smooth, and all encompassing as possible is important for getting the innovation that is required. Email is popular but can become redundant in the ultimate goal for P&G to create innovation with collaboration. People receiving chained email responses, from a topic they lost interest months ago, is a problem they found occurring. Blogs were thought to be better because it only gained momentum through interest. The problem Microsoft bundled suites are used for emailing, instant messaging, voice transmission, data transmission, electronic conferencing, SharePoint, web browsing, contact and task management, emailing, and clandering. This was done as an overhaul to link all of the possible ways someone’s work could be shared with another. Teamcenter product lifecycle is used as well for 3d product visualization of data. This was made so more people could be apart of the lifecycle of a project. The internet. Most of the information is said to be found outside P&G about the market. Collaboration systems solve the inability to communicate properly or inefficiently. All of their systems are up to date with one another, meaning there is no complication with having to bring my personal laptop to play a presentation because powerpoint is not up to date on the computer in the conference room so it will not play my file properly- those type of situations that waste time, money, and create undue stress. Furthermore they allow vital information to move in a very fluid manner which allows every person to know what they need to know the moment they need to know it. This interconnectivity creates unison which is hard in goal oriented tasks as complex as in P&G. An interesting example of efficiency is also shown when you think of how people would email another coworker to ask a simple question, knowing the person is in the other room, or call them, and instead, now they can just send an instant message to that coworker. This reduces the flooding of email inboxes. Some technologies such as blogging is slow because it represents Extra work on top of the work already being done to essentially accomplish the same goal. The old way for writing up and distributing material was through world documents (because it could not be integrated all the different reports) and manually glue parts of the report was apart of the process. The other was to email powerpoints to each person.
The new way is to use sharepoint that takes all of the presentations and stores them at one location. This means that the ease of access is greatly increased and can be accessed by multiple people, from different locations, without having to worry about finding an email from 3 months ago with the proper attachment, as an example. Telepresence is good for making people feel like they are in the same room with a person who could be across the globe, and with a company like P&G, that is very possible. So using this collaborative technique allows for people to feel like they are in the office with someone but just virtually. The next step would be having a way for people with ideas not from their area of expertise, such as bob from sales who has an idea and asks jerry from research if its possible. I assume that is not as easily done if bob does not already know jerry on a personal level. This would allow educated ideas to become important and promote the integrated line of thinking that P&G is obviously striving for.