" ... Procter & Gamble, the world’s biggest consumer products company, continues to be one of the leaders in the race to harness massive streams of data for managing a business better. The company has been profit-forecasting on a monthly basis for about 40 years, trying to predict components such as sales, commodity prices and exchange rates. But the amount of real-time data it has been able to process has increased vastly in the past three years, thanks to better software and Moore’s Law of increasing computing power. Now P&G borrows liberally from tools born on the Web: ubiquitous high-speed networking, data visualization and high-speed analysis on multiple streams of information. The tools allow P&G to make in minutes the decisions that used to take weeks or months, when data had to be collated and passed through committees on their way to the top.
With $79 billion in sales and 127,000 employees, P&G is on the verge of having everyone’s talents known and tracked, all information about sales decided at the executive level every week and production viewed in near real-time worldwide. The company talks in terms of increasing the amount of collected data sevenfold. The airy promises of networked technology are here, at a scale rarely, if ever, deployed before.
P&G has just started a “digital skills” inventory of its employees, establishing a baseline of skills, including how to get connected to the Internet, how to use basic collaboration and knowledge-exchanging tools for online meetings and mail, and how to tap into the company’s internal social network, P&G Pulse, for news and further training. There are higher expectations for more technical jobs, of course, or in grooming certain careers ... "
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