Strassman has written whitepaper titled "7 Places to clean the clutter in i.T." , Below are some excerpts from the same:

Hewlett-Packard is on track to do that under a five-year business transformation plan that calls for cutting information- technology costs from $3.04 billion in 2003 to $2.11 billion in 2008.Seven places where the $98.5 billion company, which makes PCs, servers and printers and offers consulting services, plans to transform its business:

Simplify applications. HP plans to reduce the number of applications from more than 5,000 to fewer than 1,500.

Reduce development sites. HP is cutting down the number of technology centers devoted to developing and maintaining internal software code, from more than 100 to 29.

Shrink the workforce. Cutting back the number of applications and reducing the number of development sites make it possible to cut the I.T. workforce. HP is on track to achieve its goal of trimming the number of I.T. employees from 19,000 to 8,000.

Consolidate data centers. Over five years, HP plans to cut the number of data centers from 85 global locations to six super-centers, in three U.S. sites. Plans call for a tightly coupled grid-like structure to connect the six data centers for redundancy and failover backup.

Implement an enterprise data warehouse. Under this plan, the crowning achievement is the creation of a 400-terabyte enterprise warehouse that will accumulate data from all applications.

Embrace service-oriented architecture. The HP architecture can be characterized by the separation of the supporting delivery infrastructure-processing, data storage and communications-from the applications and the usermanaged portal.

Reap the reward. The HP effort is driven by savings from the "upstream" supply chain-the streamlining of the management of inbound materials such as parts and subassemblies. Hard savings in reduced inventory, elimination of obsolete components, and other areas total $1.5 billion for 2004, and $1.4 billion for 2005.

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Prashanth Rai