McGraw Hill Companies

On the morning of the visit to McGraw Hill Companies I was very much impressed to find myself in the midst of a busy corporate street in New York and slightly intimidated by it all, it was my first trip to this part of the city. McGraw Hill is probably the largest company that we have visited yet and the contrast was quite distinct with respect to the other organizations.

Patrick Durando, head of the Global New Media team at McGraw Hill companies, briefed us about the different domains that are handled by McGraw Hill companies and also the locations of their offices all over the world. Until then, like most people, I had known McGraw Hill only as an educational publishing company and didn't realize that McGraw Hill companies had quite a firm standing in the financial services sector.

We were then introduced to Edward Ford, a passionate employee, in charge of handling the internal social  networking website, Buzz, for McGraw Hill companies. Although Buzz was introduced to the McGraw Hill employees only a few months back, it gained popularity very quickly. Edward talked about the expected impact of creating such a vivid and socially focused intranet; it is meant to increase the operational efficiency, create a flatter organization, provide a base for knowledge sharing and crow-sourcing and eventually help in the product development.

The last speaker, Ruth Neighbors, is in charge of usability analysis, which basically involves research, evaluation and designing the interface according to the test results. She spoke about all the research that goes into creating a user-friendly application and also about the differences between focus group testing and usability testing; the former is not too helpful to make your product better. Patrick, later on took us to the studio which was brought about mainly due to his efforts and is now being used for all the McGraw Hill video recordings.

What I most appreciated was that the new media team, although a part of a huge organization, manages to introduce some level of entrepreneurship into their individual work. It reminded me completely of my last job, being part of a huge multinational corporation where individuality is somewhat lesser significant as compared to the company at large. It also reminded me about the barriers that come up in such widespread organizations, where you cannot just walk over to talk to every other person and so the level of personal communication is minimal. Hence, I really liked the sense of community that can build up through such an informal intranet system that is Buzz and think that it is very much required in any organization which has employees across the globe.