Reinventing a Megalith

Debra Dunn is Hewlett Packard’s senior V-P (strategy and corporate
operations). She is responsible for HP’s‘reinvention’that began under Carly
Fiorina a couple ofyears ago. In Bangalore to inaugurate the 40-member HP Labs,
Dunn spoke to DQabout the reinvention, the Compaq merger and the company’s
e-inclusion initiatives

What were the major objectives of the reinvention of HP and how were they
achieved? Where do you stand today with regard to that reinvention?

There were a couple of major objectives. The most critical was to become more
customer focused and improve the total customer experience. HP has historically
been a very decentralized company. We have 83 separate product lines that were
all very connected with their customers. But if you were a customer trying to
buy products from many of those different organizations, it could be a very
frustrating and confusing experience. We have now re-aligned the front end of
the organization - the sales and marketing customer-touching activities to
provide an easier, more integrated experience for the customer. We’ve also
made the internal organization more transparent so that customers can get
various combinations of the customized solutions that they want. Another
important aspect was to effectively utilize Internet technology in terms of the
way we run our own business and through that process, to eliminate redundancy
and reduce costs. We’ve successfully done that partly through a global
employee portal available in local languages. And because we now have that
global infrastructure, we are able to do the back-end transaction processing (in
India in fact) and consequently, to really streamline and reduce costs in that
way.

How will re-aligning the front-end affect product line accountability?

I will respond to that in a couple of ways. We still have very strong product
organizations. And we have more shared accountability in the organizations than
we had historically. Certainly, that creates the need for collaboration and
balance at a higher level. But I think after some initial re-setting, which is a
challenge in any major change, we’ve begun to really work through how to
manage that accountability in a shared way. So that today, we’ve got product
lines that are very strong and solid, but have major accountability for the end
results and customer facing organizations that have strong accountability for
the customer experience. And I think in the Internet age, it’s easier to roll
up information in various ways to create multiple phases of accountability and
to manage that successfully.

If the Compaq merger goes through, what’ll be its impact in terms of the
reinvention already done?

One of the reasons that the Compaq merger has been very attractive to the
management team is that pretty much since Carly (Fiorina — HP CEO) came on
board and worked with the leadership team to set a vision, we’ve been very
focussed on being able to execute on intelligent appliances connected to an
always-on internet infrastructure enabling a whole range of e-services. That’s
the over-arching vision of the company. We are focused on improved customer
experience and a more efficient business infrastructure. The Compaq merger
really accelerates our progress toward that vision by adding some technical
capability and product capability in a number of areas and augments what we are
already strong in.

Will the integration be within the framework of the new structure,
comprising the customer facing organization and the back-end organization?

There’ll be some modifications given the increased scale. But conceptually,
the focus will be very much the same.

What about the e-inclusion initiative? Are you replicating this in other
countries or is it only specific to this region?

We launched the e-inclusion initiative broadly a little over a year ago in a
spirit of what we call ‘Launch-and Learn’. So unlike many business
initiatives, we didn’t have a very deep blueprint saying this is exactly what
we’re executing…now we’ll just do it. We believed strongly that if you
look at market growth rates in developed and developing countries and at the
impact of technology on what is possible, we, as a technology company need to
figure out ways of delivering value-added technology solutions to people further
down the economic pyramid. Based on this and the belief that long-term growth
will be fueled by ability to deliver those solutions, we started launching pilot
projects to begin learning.

Is the focus on local language initiatives, low-cost access devices or a
whole range of various other things?

It’s a whole range of things. We’re beginning with Kuppam in Andhra
Pradesh and the approach is to engage with the community through very deep
collaboration with a number of players. So we are collaborating with the
government in Andhra Pradesh which already has a very strong vision for
utilizing IT to deliver various services to the citizens. We’re collaborating
with some of the local organizations and the goal is to deliver a variety of
services to the citizens of Andhra Pradesh. The idea is to stimulate things like
economic development and job creation and to accelerate the delivery of various
services in ways that are easier and friendlier, particularly in terms of
government services to the citizens of Kuppam.

Some of your objectives seem similar to projects MIT Media Labs is
planning to do with the Indian government. Do you plan to team up with them?

We’ve talked to them extensively. HP works closely with MIT
on many fronts and we have partnered with them for many years. We’ve spent a
lot of time with the local Media Labs team talking about their priorities and
ours and we have committed to collaborate both on their projects and ours to a
large extent.

How does this work? Would this result in new technologies
that you might incorporate into products? Or would you be using existing
products with services tailored around a specific need?

I think it’s a combination. If you look at what it would
really take to deliver a robust suite of services to a community like Kuppam,
there is a significant amount of infrastructure, including things like servers
and storage, which could leverage very heavily from existing products and
solutions.

On the access side, we think there’s probably a need for
the development of systems that suit the project. HP Labs India, being the
research arm, will gather the experience that you gain in practicing in these
I-communities.

We can then use that experience to invent a combination of
low-cost technologies, which are appropriate to the implementation. What we’re
trying to do here at HP Labs India is to grow to 40 full-time employees and just
as e-inclusion is doing, try to leverage partnerships with academic
institutions, with the government and with companies that can be in alliance
with us.

Prasanto K Roy and Sarita
Rani,In Bangalor