HP CIO discusses changing the corporate culture, spending more time with customers, and moving to cloud platforms to execute faster.
Hewlett-Packard loves to remind people who it does things on a major scale. Its global supply chain? The most important in the world, it says. Its deployments of SAP ERP, Salesforce.com CRM, Workday HR, and Microsoft Lync unified communications software? Also the most important. Its $120 billion in annual revenue? World’s biggest among IT vendors.
How about its big-company bureaucracy? You cannot bait HP executives into any planetary references there, though new global CIO Ramon Baez concedes that various company processes before he arrived in August 2012 “were built for slow.”
Part of Baez’s job, working with boss John Hinshaw, executive VP of technology & operations, and the remainder of the HP leadership team, is to focus “on making a model that’s more flexible and agile. How will we move on the speed of economic?” Baez said in a large-ranging interview with InformationWeek. After losing its way under former CEO Leo Apotheker, HP is now heading into year three of CEO Meg Whitman’s five-year turnaround plan. Last year the corporate keen on diagnosing problems and shoring up its processes and infrastructure, and this year it has interested by rebuilding, before it heads into the recovery and expansion parts of Whitman’s grand strategy.
[ Need to know more concerning the CEO’s strategy? See HP’s Whitman: Microsoft Now Our Rival . ]
Progress have been slow. Following an analyst meeting in October, where Whitman reversed her earlier statement that company revenue would likely grow next year, the corporate released an announcement saying its revenue decline will “moderate” from last year’s.
In an interview I conducted earlier this year with Hinshaw, he said HP’s customers wish to see three main things from the corporate right this moment: stability and a consistent strategy; renewed product innovation; and “one HP face” as they buy from multiple company units. I asked Baez about progress on that last front primarily, as most CIOs I meet with say what frustrates them most about HP is its inability to provide them a single point of contact/throat to choke.
Baez responded by talking about Whitman’s emphasis on building customer relationships, the undeniable fact that she has met with greater than 1,000 customers in her two years as HP chief. He noted the brand new “HP Way Now,” about reemphasizing the rules Bill Hewlett and David Packard established greater than 70 years ago.
“That being said, this can be a very large company. It takes time to vary the culture. It’s my responsibility as a pacesetter to point out what that ‘One HP’ actually means,” Baez said, noting that he is an executive sponsor of 5 large customer accounts. “Once I meet with the CIOs of these businesses, i would like them to think that they are the sole customer I ever reflect on. i am not in sales. I’m an IT practitioner, and that i know what I expect from my suppliers, and that i like to treat them how i would like to be treated. i attempt to demonstrate that among our leadership teams, the deal teams, the account teams, and so on. It truly is the way you work with a customer.”
HP is training several hundred executives as sponsors to enhance the quality account GMs. “Everyone is a bit of frustrated because we went through some changes in that structure,” Baez acknowledged. “But these account GMs now know who to arrive out to.”
I asked Baez about his overall philosophy on IT leadership and strategy, and the way his charter at HP differs from the single of former HP CIO Randy Mott, who led an “IT transformation” on the company between 2005 and 2008, under which it consolidated 85 datacenters to 6 and six,000 applications to about 1,200, while requiring a rigorous cost-benefit analysis of each new IT project.
“What i will be able to do is articulate how my leadership team views IT and changes inside the operating model,” Baez said. “I tell my team that i do not want us viewed just as a business enterprise. i need us viewed as a worth creator and an information center. That’s very important here, especially when account teams say, ‘Hey, Ramon, are you able to come to speak to 1 of my customers about so and so.’ I’d like to, but you realize what, i’ve someone within my organization who’s knowledgeable in that area, and so they do an effective job, they could present to that specific. If all they need to do is see me, that’s something. But when they truly want the understanding of ways to do something, let’s bring [that expert] in.
“First, we changed the organization from being very inward-focused to being very outward-focused. We’re deliberating that customer at all times. How does this make the experience for the client working with us better? The second one thing, we aren’t optimizing for IT; we’re optimizing for the business. … We’ve gone from a price-cutting view of the sector to at least one of investing in innovation. … We aren’t observing consolidation. Those days are over. We’re keen on making a model that’s more flexible and agile. How do we move on the speed of economic?”
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