The Business of the R&D Team - Essay Example

One of the collaborative tools that the company uses is information systems and software. Web 2.0 has been an effective social networking and collaborative tool. The firm also used unified communications, Microsoft Live Server Functionality, web conferencing with live meetings, content management, and SharePoint. Two additional collaborative tools were instant messaging and Microsoft Outlook. The benefits of these tools include the ability of the workers to communicate better. The size of the company has influenced the collaborative capabilities of the company.

Tools such as emails which typically work effectively to collaborate are not that effective at P&G because the company is so large and has so many employees. The employees at P&G consider newer collaborative tools more work on top of emails. In the past researchers used to write up their experiments using Microsoft Office applications, then they would print them out and glue them together page by page into notebooks. The company today uses a customized version of Microsoft tools that allows instant communication between employees.

The company also created virtual databases that allowed researchers the ability to communicate with each other in a more efficient manner. Information could now be shared among the researchers. Telepresence has been very effective at Procter & Gamble due to the fact that the company has a global operation. These tools allow researchers, marketers, and managers to keep the lines of communication open. A tool that the company should use to improve its communication is Skype. Skype allows employees to achieve two-way video and audio.

A second tool that could enhance collaboration is to create a cellular phone application that allows the employees to upload information into a server that the employees can access instantly.