Mr. Joe Schueller, IT Innovation Manager at Procter & Gamble, was interviewed recently about how the global giant is adopting social computing.

The end goals:

• for P&G to become a highly-efficient, more collaborative, more resourceful environment where employees are pushing innovative solutions out faster
• for management and employees to get attuned to the horizontal spread of information through networks, and
• for the org to ‘close the loop’ by participating in open conversations within the company’s communities of practice

P&G has amassed 170 years worth of business knowledge. The current interest is to map that history around functional expertise and to share that information horizontally via an open system . . .but also preserve the hierarchal structure of such a large organization.

According to the CEO of P&G, the trick is to outfit its 138,000 employees located around the globe with a way to collaborate without boundaries, to take that insight and people and help them deliver solutions that make consumers’ lives better.

Schueller says that P&G leadership is seeing an intolerance for duplicating work; by using a collaborative platform, the company can exeperience cost savings. Less open platforms run the risk of being less secure, less innovative, and more expensive to operate. 

Stay tuned. There’s more to come on this topic . . .

#1 beurette on 5.31.2009 at 4:56 PM

Waiting for the next article. Intereting interview and nice blog !

#2 Classified Ads on 6.04.2009 at 3:16 AM

Looks like PG&E is able to achieve good results with relatively small amount of investment on platform. Being able to do more with less and facilitate more collaboration.

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