Proctor & Gambles Business Strategy and the Use of Collaboration Systems Proctor and Gambles goal is to maintain the popularity of its existing brands through advertising and marketing, while also creating innovative products cost effectively to improve the lives of their consumers around the world. To increase its success in the business world, P&G spends 3.4 percent of revenue on innovation, therefor finding better ways to innovate and develop new ideas is critical and for a large company like P&G, finding methods of collaboration that are effective throughout the company can be difficult. That's why P&G has been active in implementing IT that fosters effective collaboration and innovation. Procter and Gamble utilizes a distributed development strategy, to form a basis for the distributed development strategy Procter and Gamble must make use of a collaborative environment. both as a way to develop groundbreaking innovations more quickly and to reduce research and development costs. P&G is using collaboration systems to execute its business model and business strategy by allowing researchers to use the tools to share the data they've collected on various brands; by giving marketers a more effective way to access the data they need to create more highly targeted ad campaigns; and enabling managers easier ways to find the people and data they need to make critical business decisions. To do this P&G needed to develop alternatives to business practices that were not sufficiently collaborative. Such as e-mail. Although seemingly a tool used for communication it is not a sufficiently collaborative way to share information and does not support 3D visual data to be shared easily. Another challenge for P&G was managing information and applications across multiple platforms. In order to ensure that this problems are overcome, Procter and Gamble considered a collaboration system that would act as leverage to the company's IT infrastructure which was based on Microsoft Technology. With the use of Microsoft SharePoint-based technology, the sharing of data and innovative information within an environment where all players are included would become easier. P&G would also decide to implement 'Connectbeam' a new search product that allows employees to share bookmarks, tag content with descriptive words that appear in future searches, and facilitates social networks of coworkers to help them find and share information more effectively. Which would ultimately enable them to adequately manage information and applications across multiple platforms. However, some collaborative technologies have been slow to catch on at P&G. With significant resistance throughout the organization which is against switching to a new way of doing things. Employees are accustomed to e-mail, resulting in the employees being hesitant to the changes, insisting that the newer collaborative tools represent more work on top of e-mail, in contrast to them being a better alternative. P&G's response to the resistance would be to completely revamp its collaboration systems. With tools that would include instant messaging, unified communications (which integrates services for voice transmission, data transmission, instant messaging, e-mail, and electronic conferencing), Microsoft Live Communications Server functionality, Web conferencing with Live Meeting, and content management with SharePoint. With 20,000 employees using Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server works with outlook to support multiple users with shared mailboxes and calendars, SharePoint lists and meeting schedules. SharePoint also provides tools for e-mail, calendaring, task management, contact management, note taking, and Web browsing. P&G would also adopt Teamcenter product lifecycle collaboration software from Siemens, a software that supports the sharing of 3D visual product data. Teamcenter is based on Microsoft Sharepoint, so that it works side by side with P&G employees' existing Microsoft software tools, enabling more people to participate in project lifecycle processes. In the past P&G executives had no way to integrate all the reports and discussions into a single document. For instance one executive glued the results of experiments into Word documents and passed them out at a conference. Another executive manually entered his data and speech into PowerPoint slides, and then e-mailed the each file to his colleagues. Resulting in the same report ending up in multiple individual mailboxes. Now,with Microsoft SharePoint, P&G's IT department can create a page where that executive can post all of his presentations and all the presentations are stored in a single location, but are still accessible to employees and colleagues in other parts of the company. InnovationNet is another collaborative tool that P&G would implement. It contains over five million research-related documents in digital format accessible via a browser-based portal. Eliminating gluing experiments in notebooks. P&G had another major innovation with it's embracing of Cisco TelePresence conference rooms in many of it's locations global wide. The technology makes it possible to hold high-definition meetings over long distances., telepresence is an excellent way For a company as large as P&G to foster collaboration between employees across not just countries, but continents. While also providing significant travel savings, more efficient flow of ideas, and quicker decision making. Other ways P&G could use collaboration to foster innovation could be training, to train with an aim of improving team collaboration as a way to foster innovation. Collaboration can also be used to discover new tools of innovation and different effective techniques.