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.

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.

And then beyond that, of course, we’re big into audio- and videoconferencing. And we’ve been experimenting with telepresence, which involves elevating that video capability into a more real-time, life-size, environmental kind of capability.

I understand that your philosophy was not to force collaboration tools on your employees but create demand for them. Can you explain how you do that?

About two years ago, I sort of banned the use of the word ‘deploy’ and said, we’re not going to deploy anything anymore. We’re going to put this product on the shelf, and we’re going to have people adopt it willingly. And the reason they will do that is because we’re going to make the story and the business case so compelling that they absolutely can’t refuse.

There was not a lot of confidence in that approach at the time, but now two years later, I can tell you that for all of the products that we now have on the desktop in the hands of our employees and users around the world, in almost 100 percent of the cases, it’s been because they went and got the software and willingly put it on their desktops and engaged. 

What you get is a population that isn’t resisting you from the beginning. And the whole fear factor and resistance to change is greatly diminished when you’re making a choice rather than being given a mandate. Literally, what we did was describe for people why these tools matter, and what was going to be different every day for them if they would just use them and try them and use them. And they trusted enough to try it.

Now, there are always exceptions. You deal with that by consensus. Once all of the people around you and all of your friends have moved to a new tool set, you will eventually feel left behind and join them.

Today, our measurements tell us we’ve saved employees about 111 million minutes worth of their time [as of late September, 2007]. [Ed note: That translates to more than 77,000 24-hour days.] We’re capturing the amount of daily minutes that these tools are saving people.

How do you do capture that?

We take some typical tasks that an office worker does and have them complete the tasks using their old way of doing things. Then we go back and have them complete the same tasks [using the collaboration tools] and measure the difference. We’ll do that for a sample size that is statistically relevant. We also do a lot of user surveying to understand the degree of satisfaction with our services. 

Unlike previous deployments, we have not seen a dip in user satisfaction associated with the change. In fact, we’ve seen user satisfaction elevate by two tenths of a point on a 10-point scale. That’s unprecedented. And the final thing we do is we ask them, ‘Do you feel that these tools are saving you time and, if so, about how much?’ In many cases, people are saying that they’ve been saving 15, 20 minutes a day as a result of doing things differently. Our users are reporting that themselves; it’s not something that we manufactured for a PowerPoint presentation.

And then can you take that and make an ROI case for the tools?

You can. We’ve resisted translating minutes into dollars. But obviously the next step would be for people to say — well, how many days is that, and how many employees is it, and so on and so forth. But what we’ve really tried to do is focus on the time that people save, and we really aren’t trying to put a price to that. It’s somewhat priceless, actually. People’s time and their own personal efficiency are priceless. 

And that’s true about the increases in connectivity and the increases in collaboration that we’re seeing as a result of these tools and the result of their introduction. Once again, we’ve not put a dollar amount on that. The dollars will be in the outcome of accelerated initiatives, accelerated time to market, ideas that ebb and flow more freely across boundaries and among our own employees. That’s really difficult to measure in terms of dollars.

What would you say are some of the greatest benefits that collaboration technology has brought you so far?

We’ve started to see a cross-pollination of ideas and a cross-pollination of innovation and technology really start to take root. What we’re also seeing is that people know each other better than they knew each other before. Around the world, they know where each other work and the conditions they work in. They know what they’re working on. They’re able to make relevant connections more easily.

Are there particular collaboration applications that you would say have been more successful than others?

In the last year or two, our use of audioconferencing and video in general as a collaboration tool have accelerated — has gone through the roof in many cases. Our investigation into telepresence is a result of that. I firmly believe that video will be the next true enabler for the enterprise, and we’ll be the second ones to know [because] the consumer market has latched on to video in a big way. 

Much of what we still do today textually or verbally you can capture so much more efficiently [with video]. For example, training video-on-demand has been relevant for a while now. There are so many more opportunities where a message needs to be delivered or a demonstration needs to occur. Video could play a role there in providing a much more efficient delivery mechanism than traditional means. So, we’re looking at that really hard, and that’s in addition to traditional videoconferencing, which has its purpose, and audioconferencing, which is huge here. Our audioconferencing minutes have probably tripled in the last five years.

Presence technology has been tremendous because it opens the window to connecting with other employees. If you have front and center on your desktop some of these powerful presence applications — and Microsoft Office Communicator is one of those, there are others — from there you can do things like initiate a videoconference, initiate a phone call, initiate an audioconference, initiate even an application-sharing session. I can initiate a file transfer. So, there are lots of things that I can drive off of presence just by virtue of the fact that I know you’re sitting there right now, and you’re available.

A typical e-mail conversation might be a serial, lengthy event if I have to bounce a conversation back and forth over the course of a day or two. Today, I attempt that because it’s a habit. But I will immediately be coached by the collaboration tools to instead reshape the conversation into an immediate one via phone or chat. 

If I type Lisa’s name into the destination address line, my e-mail client will tell me that she’s online right now, and I can just click on her and talk to her, rather than send an e-mail. And if I can’t reach Lisa, all right, who can I reach? Who can answer this quickly? It helps accelerate the pace of our work. I can take care of the matter at hand immediately rather than stretch it out in a serial e-mail fashion over a day or two.

We’ve had instant messaging since 1999 or 2000. The difference is, it was a separate entity on your desktop. You had to go there intentionally. And that’s not your first instinct if you’re very habitually pushing business through e-mail, for example. And being an e-mail-centric company, it was hard to move people out of there. Having presence tools that are integrated with e-mail, as is the case with [Live Communication Server] and [Office Communicator] and Outlook, gives us more immediacy.

What about application-sharing? How much of that is going on?

Everybody uses [Microsoft’s] NetMeeting to quickly share applications with someone else. I might be working on a spreadsheet that I need Lisa to see, to quickly look at some numbers. We could edit them together and we’re done. That happened in 12 minutes versus 12 hours, if you bounce the file back and forth as an e-mail attachment. The presence engines we have are capable of driving those kinds of application sharing sessions. You can start a chat and an application share right out of the same interface.

How does all this mesh with your corporate hierarchy? For example, can anyone see the company president is online and available and IM him?

Yes. Anyone can. There’s no restriction on that. Obviously discretion applies and respect for the person’s schedule. The good news is — with these tools, you can actually very quickly tell if this person is truly scheduled in a meeting or what their schedule looks like. Our executives do use these tools. Like everything else, I think it’s community-based. You’re more comfortable and more familiar with some people than you are with others.

One of our VPs was mentioning the other day that he would much rather have his employees quickly IM him and resolve a question than schedule a meeting that’s going to take 30 minutes. He said, in two minutes, I can answer the question, then I don’t have to clutter my calendar with these 30-minute sessions.

The other thing that’s poked its head up is the notion of office hours. People have begun to habitually schedule time when they’re available for IM or quick engagements. They’re taking care of three or four or five things in a two-hour window that normally would have stretched out over six hours.

Collaboration tools seem to touch a number of different areas within IT — from e-mail to telephony and the conferencing systems. How do you decide who gets ownership of what piece from an IT management perspective?

I think the way you decide is, who has the passion for it? Who has the subject matter expertise? And who can translate from a very large, complex, robust set of choices down to the small portfolio of things that you know will make a difference right now? And who can deliver those things to the enterprise right now? Who are those individuals? They tend to own it. And there’s a passion there for productivity, and there’s a passion for the intersection of productivity and technology that you have to have to own that for an enterprise. That’s who you choose from. Who has the passion? Who has the history? And who can deliver — because you can never have this stuff too fast.

What would you say has surprised you most about the deployment of collaboration technology?

The surprising part to me was that our user satisfaction didn’t dip at all. I had prepared our management for the fact that people don’t deal with change very well, and we should be ready for a potential backlash, and we have not seen one ounce of it. I think that speaks to our internal marketing and communications. 

We have done an outstanding job of describing the benefit and the future state in a way that they understand. And for a change, we didn’t invest millions of dollars in user training. We didn’t force people to sit down and spend hours all around the world without consideration for their schedule or any of that. We did a lot with self-help. We did a lot to introduce and soothe the worry and soothe the concern upfront.

I have been completely surprised by the amount of savings that the users themselves have reported back in terms of how much time these tools are saving them. Another surprise is, we have eclipsed by far the speed with which we’ve been able to distribute the new e-mail tool. I was here for the last e-mail migration, and that was a three-year process. This is going to be about half that from soup to nuts. It took us about half as much time with half as many people, and user satisfaction did not dip.

Why was this one so much faster?

Because the users bought into it. Again, it’s getting excitement built upfront, so the users really want this stuff. Right now, we’re in a demand deficit for these tools. People want them faster than we can distribute them. And I can’t say that that has ever been true in the past.

Has anything disappointed you about the collaboration technology?

I’m someone who looks down the road. I’m looking at that next horizon now. What disappoints me a bit is that as far as we’ve come with the introduction of these collaboration tools, I still think we have quite a ways to go both technologically and culturally to really work at our peak. I mentioned video earlier. I believe video is going to be transformational in this company, in terms of collaboration. Now, looking at that next horizon, I know how much more we can do and what the opportunities are. I want to get this [initial phase] behind us and provide the leadership necessary to get to that next horizon. So, it’s not so much a disappointment — just maybe a bit of fatigue, knowing that we’ve gotten so far and done so well, and we’ve still got so far to go.

Desmond is events editor for Network World and president of PDEdit, an IT publishing company in Southborough, Mass. Reach him at paul@pdedit.com.