On May 9, 2002 Maureen Conway, Chief Information Officer of Hewlett Packard, addressed the iMinds CIO/CTO Council on the topic of “The CIO as a Change Agent”. Maureen was able to offer a broad perspective of the challenge, given the changes she’s participated in at HP.

Arriving at HP in 1989 she joined a firm that had no single brand, each business group made independent decisions and, as she noted, “the company operated as 1000 tribes”. Despite HP’s technology focus that frequently involves selling its products and services to CIOs, HP relegated its own IT operations and CIO to a necessary evil status. The CIO was viewed as the keeper of the back office and largely uninvolved in the business of HP. Many systems at HP dated from the 1960s and were highly inefficient—the company’s $2.5 billion annual IT budget was 90% consumed by on-going operations with little available to support new or strategic initiatives. Since each business unit made its own system decisions the company had many redundancies and obtained little synergy across businesses; something as simple as getting a view of key customers’ purchases across HP’s business was nearly impossible as each used incompatible Customer Relationship Management systems.

This environment made change emanating from the CIO’s office especially difficult. But Maureen built motivation for change via a number of efforts. Tapping customers she heard their complaints regarding the difficulty of working with HP. Employing benchmarking she highlighted how inefficient HP’s way was. When Carly Fiorina joined HP as CEO in 1999 and insisted on a new approach, including having one front end approach across HP, it further facilitated changes.

With the impetus building for a new approach Maureen instituted a number of initiatives to make IT a driver of change rather than a hindrance. Her first steps involved instituting accountability and governance. As HP reorganized around four product groups rather than hundreds, Maureen put in place four group CIOs that reported to the product groups’ general managers. This helped ensure that IT initiatives were responsive to business needs and that IT was more able to influence issues. Maureen also focused IT and leveraged HP’s strengths. For example, she moved their extensive data center operations to HP’s outsourcing group that performed similar activities on behalf of external customers. She also rationalized the disconnected efforts in IT—choosing a standard approach to supply chain management, customer relations management, etc.

One of the examples of improvements that Maureen pointed to was within their Human Relations department. HP utilized over 2,000 employee-oriented portals; some run by corporate, others by departments. Each utilized different software and required considerable staff to operate, maintain and update. HP chose to standardize its portal using Epicentric (an iMinds portfolio company) utilizing one infrastructure while still enabling the resources to be delivered and tailored as needed. As a result, Maureen noted, HP saved over $50 million dollars in the first year through this one initiative.

Another effort which Maureen highlighted was the new approach to cost control. In the past IT spent considerable effort to refine and charge its costs across thousands of efforts to hundreds of businesses. As a result, IT invoiced internal businesses with over 1.8 million transactions monthly. This was not only expensive for IT to administer but also for the businesses to manage. Now IT tracks its costs across processes, ensures its competitiveness with external benchmarking and issues an aggregate internal charge monthly.

As these projects and new approaches have gained traction the credibility and trust of IT has grown, enabling further changes. IT and the business units also have become more tightly integrated and aligned. Each major IT initiative includes a senior business executive as a sponsor. IT now has joint agreements with the business units that clearly define the responsibility of each and create an interdependent environment. IT executives are now active within business units so they can both influence the business and be more responsive to its needs.

Through Maureen’s efforts Hewlett Packard’s IT investments have become more productive and supportive of the overall business. As CIO she served as an active agent of change.