InformationWeek 500: Monsanto's Collaborative Growth Plan

For the 19,000 Monsanto scientists and employees spread across 63 countries, the watchword is collaboration: Getting a biotech product to market requires plenty of cross-functional skills. Company top execs long ago established "relationships and networks" as key competencies and made a concerted shift from being deeply hierarchical to focusing on teams. So unified communications, instant messaging, and Enterprise 2.0-rich collaboration tools like SharePoint and Office Communications Server are natural fits for the company.

"We're trying to take a relationship-rich culture and turbocharge it via technology," says CIO Mark Showers. The imminent closing of the major access route to Monsanto's main headquarters for a two-year reconstruction project made it all the more urgent to get people digitally connected, since employees would soon be forced to endure longer commutes or work from home.

However, when your company's lifeblood is intellectual property, the collaborative spirit must coexist with governance. That meant IT spearheading a program to set criteria for records retention and access control before the project could move forward. The Web 2.0 era has "brought the intellectual property group and the IT group closer together than ever," Showers says. "The trick is being able to describe how you're going to be able to do proper governance of information."

Once satisfactory controls were in place, Monsanto created a working group and brainstormed for about eight months on collaboration best practices and emerging technologies. Keeping it simple was a guiding philosophy that led to adoption of Microsoft SharePoint and Office Communications Server.

Part of the overall strategy was to use suites to give users a single experience "without having to go to different tools for everything," says Lou Clark, Monsanto's master architect.

The company then turned its collaboration vision into a formal initiative and handed it to a strategy group led by top IT managers who would be in charge of different parts of the effort, from architecture to app support. A collaboration team was formed under that group, comprising leaders of projects like voice-over-IP and SharePoint deployment. This team meets weekly to share progress of the more than 12 projects in place at any given time.

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Showers downplays the number of moving pieces. "We're taking a walk-before-you-run approach," he says. Before Monsanto puts technology in place, it sets expectations with employees. The company often uses IT and R&D as pilot groups.

Since taking the first steps with SharePoint, Monsanto has consolidated hundreds of document databases while implementing new access and retention controls and integrating options such as "save to SharePoint" within Office. With the new company-wide portal in place, IT is beginning to roll out custom SharePoint portals for business units.

On the unified communications front, Monsanto began with a progressive VoIP implementation featuring unified messaging, a migration from conventional teleconferences to the use of MeetingPlace for Web conferencing with audio, and instant messaging with Microsoft Office Communicator.

Though IM was just introduced in November, the technology has become mission-critical: Monsanto already sees 400,000 daily messages among 16,000 users, and when IM went down two weeks after being deployed, within hours business leads in the Asia-Pacific region were sending urgent messages to IT saying that the outage was impacting business. IM recently has been recognized by Monsanto as a key tool in upgrading its SAP implementation.

Clark focuses on process improvements like these as benchmarks for success. "The metrics around collaboration are always difficult in terms of dollars and cents," he says. "I tend to focus more on how it improves particular processes."

Within a few years--Clark won't give an exact timeline--all employees will have Office Communicator, which will act as an instant messaging client, soft phone, and gateway to Web and videoconferencing. "The vision is the ability to escalate to different levels of communication," he says, adding that the technology to do this is already in various stages of rollout, from proof of concept to pilot to production. Cisco CallManager and Microsoft Office Communications Server will allow Monsanto to integrate presence and click-to-call into Office apps, Outlook, SharePoint, blogs, and eventually, Monsanto's other business systems.

BLOGS AND WIKIS
What's next for Monsanto's SharePoint deployment? Blogs and wikis. One Monsanto research group that acted as a guinea pig for these now has 800 people using them. The group's portal has multiple blogs, Clark says, and it's made RSS feed setup easier. New corporate communications blogs also are being deployed.

"It's still evolving, and we're still learning how to use it effectively," Clark says of the new channels, adding that many Monsanto employees are learning exactly what blogs and wikis are.

LESSONS LEARNEDKEEP IT SIMPLE Big projects can get out of hand if there are too many moving parts and the technology's too complicated.MAKE A PLAN   Map out steps far ahead of time and formalize brainstorming, strategy, and deployment processes.FLEX FINANCING  Focus on process improvements if ROI in terms of dollars proves elusive. GUARD IP  Keep the legal department abreast of collaboration plans if you have lots of intellectual property to protect.

Monsanto hired Rob Cross, a University of Virginia professor, to perform social network analysis on the company. Cross, who's also worked with Microsoft and Procter & Gamble, is helping identify key influencers and information bottlenecks, detail how disparate locations communicate, and generally uncover the network of employee relationships at Monsanto.

The company will use that information to share best practices on getting new employees involved in the corporate culture, using information brokers as mentors, and spreading responsibility when certain employees become logjams. The information could also be used by IT, Showers says. "It's a way to identify key influencers and grease the skids in terms of adoption of new tools," he says.

Plans include using BlackBerrys and Windows Mobile phones to mobilize the collaboration infrastructure. SharePoint, Showers says, has "just scratched the surface" on how it can be used as a social networking tool. There are kinks to be worked out, he admits, in terms of shifting the corporate culture toward new technologies that may seem foreign to workers. But if Monsanto knows anything, it's how to encourage growth.

Illustration by Brian Stauffer

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InformationWeek 500: Monsanto Stays Ahead Of The Curve