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How Is P&G Using Collaboration Systems Essay

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Collaboration and Innovation at Procter & Gamble Case Study Questions 1 What is Procter & Gamble’s business strategy and business model? How do these relate to collaboration and innovation within this company? 2 How is P&G using collaboration systems? Describe each of the systems and technologies, what processes were carried out previously, and discussing the benefits of each. 3 Why were some collaborative technologies slow to catch on at P&G? What management efforts are required to reduce the effects of resistance to change such as these? 4 Compare telepresence to video conferencing. Why is telepresence such a useful collaborative tool for a company like P&G? Collaboration and Innovation at …show more content…

At the time, Lafley’s proclamation was considered to be visionary, but in the past 10 years P&G has made good on his promise. The first order of business for P&G was to develop alternatives to business practices that were not sufficiently collaborative. The biggest culprit says Joe Schueller, Innovation Manager for P&G’s Global Business Services division, was perhaps an unlikely one: email. Though it’s ostensibly a tool for communication, email is not a sufficiently collaborative way to share information; senders control the flow of information, but may fail to send mail to colleagues who most need to see it, and colleagues that don’t need to see certain emails will receive mailings long after they’ve lost interest. Blogs and other collaboration tools, on the other hand, are open to anyone interested in their content and attract comments from interested users. However, getting P&G employees to actually use these newer products in place of email has been a struggle for Schueller. Employees have resisted the changes, insisting that newer collaborative tools represent more work on top of email, as opposed to a better alternative. People are accustomed to email, and there’s significant organisational inertia against switching to a new way of doing things. Some P&G processes for sharing knowledge were notoriously inefficient. For

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