By licensing technologies to other companies, P&G also gets a nonmonetary return, says Mike Hock, associate director of the EBD group. It's able to apply customer recommendations to improve systems it runs in-house.

For example, in mid-2004, one of P&G's Power Factor customers, a soft-drink maker, complained that the system was too complicated to use, says Hock. So P&G spent the next six months simplifying how the individual modules work and interface with one another. Those changes benefited not only the soft-drink maker and other customers that license the technology, but also P&G's internal manufacturing groups, which use it as well.

Allowing customers to "commercially harden" a P&G system or business process "is a great way of feeding your innovation process," says Hock. To make sure this happens, Metz meets regularly with P&G's IT customer advisory boards to solicit their input on potential product improvements.

Companies that have successfully marketed some of their IT, such as Honeywell International Inc., typically have leaders with a strong mix of IT and business skills that have helped them to make the transition from IT to a revenue-generating entity, says Navi Radjou, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. in Cambridge, Mass.

Metz has some business experience of his own. In the late 1990s, for example, he worked with developers in India to set up Web development work for P&G. That helped kick-start his role with EBD. Still, he acknowledges that he faces some formidable challenges. These include conveying the commercial viability of some of P&G's technologies and work processes to internal IT staffers, some of whom see marketing IT as "a foreign notion," he says.