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DuPont Masters the Science of Collaboration

DuPont is one of the world's largest, most dynamic and innovative science companies. More than 60,000 DuPont employees in 70 countries, working for 20 business units in five divisions, develop and produce items for every industry from nutrition to construction, apparel to electronics, transportation to safety and security. DuPont's brands are everyday industrial and household names: Teflon®, Kevlar®, Tyvek® and Pioneer® brand seeds.

Yet DuPont's very size and scope of operations bring their own challenges. Individual businesses making local decisions can cause inefficiencies and drive up costs. Through its One DuPont initiative, the company has moved to global decision-making organizations. These teams make decisions on behalf of the whole company - whether it is in designing new products, fine-tuning manufacturing processes or sealing a deal with a new customer. This is vital to DuPont's continued success, and communication is central to the process.

"The globalization of our organization requires us to communicate more effectively and efficiently," says Tom Marcin, Director of Global Telecommunications. Technology ensures that the right players can come together at the right time to make the most well-informed decisions. "It is critical for any business unit to be able to communicate directly with any other, regardless of location," states Marcin. Any-to-any connectivity, backed by DuPont's global MPLS-based IP network, "is paramount to us achieving our IT strategy."

"Today, telecommunications plays a more significant role than it ever has in the past," Marcin points out. "Our employees need to communicate with customers and suppliers all over the world for intelligent, rapid decision making. Our customers demand it, and we demand it of our providers."

The major collaboration tools in use at DuPont are email, audio conferencing and Web conferencing. "It is ingrained in our culture to share, mark up and highlight documents or presentations during an audio conference," Marcin says. "We are also looking at Web-enabled program and project management tools that are more collaborative than the traditional tools that sit on one individual's desktop." Blogging and idea-capturing portals are being piloted.

Moving toward unified communications

"We need to enable our people to be successful by giving them the right devices and tools," Marcin says. Increasingly, those tools are moving DuPont toward a world of unified communications. For DuPont, "unified communications" means connecting people, information and machines in a secure, timely manner. According to Marcin, at the core, it's about integrating mobile telephony with wireline telephony or IP telephony. "It's integration of any type of voice device that you may have with your traditional data communication applications, like email and instant messaging."

Marcin sees instant messaging as important to any technology solution that enables rapid decision making, and "the messaging side of mobility will become more important to the enterprise in the future." Marcin points to the popularity among consumers of technologies like instant messaging, short message service and Web logs, and believes the "consumerization," or as he calls it, the "prosumerization" of IT is something that organizations need to be very cognizant of. Marcin believes that companies will need to respond to the workplace needs of employees who are accustomed to using a variety of these communication tools in their personal lives. The availability of such tools also helps companies like DuPont attract younger, more technically savvy employees.

DuPont is moving to an environment with one standardized source of company data that is accessible, secure and available for authorized users to make accurate decisions. Looking to the future, Marcin anticipates an expansion of "presence-based" unified communications capabilities, where the systems themselves could identify triggers and set off a collaboration event. "It's not person-initiated or user-initiated," Marcin says. "The system identifies a significant event, knows who the key stakeholders are, and pulls these people together, regardless of their location, what platform they are on, and what communication tools they have available to them."

A clear line of responsibility

As he works to bring such innovations into the mix, Marcin evaluates each for its new functionality, the additional value and cost-savings potential. A business case is developed and justified by hard dollar savings, as well as soft benefits. Recent projects have saved millions of dollars a year, but once realized, are not available to fund new initiatives. "Each project must stand on its own from a hard savings perspective," Marcin states.

Rather than buying services from the best-in-class supplier in every region and integrating the collection themselves, DuPont saves both time and money by joining One DuPont with one global networking provider: AT&T. Working with an organization that delivers end-to-end solutions across many different platforms increases the security of the system and makes it much easier to maintain. "The benefits of going with a single global IP provider outweigh the perceived potential cost advantages of going with independent regional providers and trying to integrate them," Marcin says.

Today a new kind of technology - the science of collaboration - is helping prepare DuPont for its third century of innovation. DuPont encourages its providers to create new enterprise services and bring them to market more quickly. "We continue to push for leading-edge technology solutions," adds Marcin. This proactive approach fits perfectly with DuPont's drive to innovate.