Presence comes to P&G

When your CEO challenges you to create the world’s most collaborative company, you’d best take some definitive steps in that direction. The Procter & Gamble CEO A.G. Lafley did just that, and the challenge fell heavily on Laurie Heltsley. The director for special projects at the P&G Global Business Services unit responded in force, helping to usher in a desktop upgrade that put collaboration tools front and center on about 80,000 desktops. The tools give employees an extra 15 to 20 minutes a day by making it far easier for them to reach one another and quickly get the information they need to make decisions and get things done.

You first embarked on your collaboration effort in 2005. What were you trying to achieve?

We started as part of a larger desktop renovation. The idea was to integrate the desktop in meaningful ways so that people became more aware of each other. Presence was a real important aspect of what we were trying to infuse into the desktop: making individuals more productive and in the process, making the community more generally aware of your presence — including how to contact you, how to quickly establish information about you, [such as] where you are, your business unit, your phone number. And you’re always two or three clicks away from a call or a chat rather than people having to look you up in a directory.

Click to see: Bio of Laurie Heltsley

You’re using Microsoft Live Communication Server and Office Communicator 2005 client, which includes instant messaging. What other collaboration-related features are you using from that suite?

We were certainly after the robust presence features. And presence in the Microsoft context permeates the e-mail client, which is Outlook, and the Office applications like Word and Excel and PowerPoint. [P&G is using Office 2003 globally, and is making Office 2007 available.] E-mail is a huge business tool at Procter & Gamble. 

I would describe us as being very e-mail-centric but evolving more towards other types of collaborative and more real-time tools. There is also the group or team software encapsulated in  SharePoint Server 2007 from Microsoft. Again, presence permeates those services. Teams of individuals can congregate, share documents, share discussion, share announcements, share calendars.

Are you using any other collaboration tools?

Yes, we are. We use a number of collaboration tools around the fringes of all of that. It’s not like we’re a completely Microsoft-centric enterprise. We have a lot of very good conversations and innovation in progress with companies like Google and are testing Google search. We’ve had conversations with Skype and are experimenting with that for online phone services. 

And we maintain relationships with other companies that are also trying to evolve in the same space like SAP, Seibel and others. Each of those tools and software suites have their own collaborative element. SAP, we use widely across the company. For the general user population, we’ve centered ourselves around the desktop and the core desktop applications, but then we have other kinds of software that may be more functionally specific or business-unit specific that also have their collaborative element.