Dealing with information overload became a battle for survival for one company in particular — Philip Morris Companies, Inc.
They struggled to stay on top of breaking news, litigation, and public reaction and trends affecting its tobacco, food and beer companies, and its capital corporation, both domestically and internationally.
In 1996 as a Sr. Manager of Issues Management (IM) for Philip Morris Management Corp., Josh led an eleven employee Issues Management group tasked with supporting several hundred clients in Management, Legal, Planning, Finance, Corporate Affairs as well as individual operating companies world-wide.
In this era prior to the Internet, Josh created and delivered a plan that dealt with his department’s backlog of work, enabled access via Mac and PC, established a centralized Issues.Net (Extranet), and created an Electronic Bill Room for tracking legislation.
Backlog of Work
Because legislative analysis was extremely critical to the company’s stock price, the Issues Management employees were being overloaded with work requests. Consequently, the Issues Management employees were working extremely long hours to deal with the backlog. This became a retention issue.
At the heart of Josh’s plan was centralizing the delivery and access of his group’s information across the company to provide top executives with the critical data needed to make timely decisions and respond to legislative and market changes that were impacting the corporation.
Mac and PC Access
In 1996, Philip Morris was just beginning to adopt Internet and Intranet infrastructure and was one of the largest corporations exclusively using Apple computers.
Unfortunately, Apple did not support the wide range of analytical software packages that used by the Issues Management group and outside economic consultants. A functioning centralized network for Philip Morris needed to be accessible from Macs and PCs and had to be capable of transferring information easily from one platform to the other to distribute it to different clients.
Realizing the importance of centralizing and electronically distributing his group’s resources, Josh collaborated with the Information Systems (IS) department, which lacked both training and resources. He provided IS with financial resources to learn how to develop and host Extranets and Intranets and he helped IS to develop the necessary skills to implement the technology infrastructure needed for the Issues Management Group.
Issues.Net
Working with the IS group, Josh then developed Issues.Net, the company’s first Extranet, designed to automate many of the legislative tracking and resource services that his department provided.
When he presented the plan to senior management, it was accepted in its entirety.
The Issues.Net (Extranet system) could operate on both Macs and PCs and included calculators and other resources that could be used anywhere in the U.S. by clients with access to a modem line. Josh’s department also surveyed internal clients to determine their information needs and conducted a wide range of configuration and development tests as well as training programs in preparation for the production rollout.
Issues Management significantly streamlined its resource delivery services to hundreds of clients who could now access an even wider range of resources via computer. They eliminated much of the manual development of argumentation and analysis in favor of templates.
As a result, even the Chairman who relied on IM for information used in investor relations briefings could print up-to-date summaries of critical information.
Moreover, end-users had the ability to access these reports directly which further cut down on time and employee efforts to monitor and report on legislative activity.
Josh established a technology vision for the next three to five years that ultimately saved the department several millions of dollars.
Electronic Bill Room
Building off his experience with Issues.Net, Josh was asked to chair a task force in State Government Affairs to help them develop an automated process for legislative tracking.
Working with nearly 40 State Government Affairs Personnel as well as senior management, Investor Relations, Planning, Finance and the Law Department, Josh worked with a consultant, StateNet, to create the Electronic Bill Room. StateNet had just developed the electronic capability to track state legislation in all 50 states. Josh coordinated an effort to specifically code all tobacco bills by special descriptors that could be immediately updated into an in-house report-generating database.
Several years later, Josh worked with StateNet and a geopolitical mapping company to create real-time maps of tobacco, food, and corporate issues.
This was the first time that StateNet ever worked collaboratively with another vendor to create geopolitical maps.
They now offer this service to all of their clients. Josh demonstrated out-of-the-box thinking when he led this group to create a centralized system to process information and distribute knowledge.
Josh embraced new technologies and systems and enabled Philip Morris to track and respond to legislative initiatives, litigation, financial and reputational concerns and act decisively to organize corporate resources to achieve the best outcome for the company. Philip Morris succeeded in weathering the challenging and changing times by effectively using the vast knowledge resources available to them through an Extranet.
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