During the SAP Summit one of the interesting meeting was with Durgadutt Nedungadi, he delivered a pretty good keynote on day 1 and had some time set up with him later which was quite interesting.

During the keynote Durgadutt referred to IT transformation initiative that they have running internally HP which I found very interesting. I followed this up during our chat and they sent sent me this interview with the HP CIO Randy Mott, in DQ India.

What are the objectives of the Initiative? (Excerpts from an article in DQ)

Workforce effectiveness by making the workforce highly organized, and the other was to get more and more people to work on development activities.

Become a leading benchmark in our industry. From the efficiency standpoint, while we are striving to be more cost effective, we also want to deliver more information, and change and adapt to meet business requirements. There was a cost element in transformation. We were striving for 4% of revenue as a goal, but ended the transformation under 2%, and the results are significant.

Translated (Excerpts from an article in DQ)

In 2005, we had 70% of our people doing support activities, and only 30% of them were doing development activities. Now, we are on the path to get 80% for development at the end of the three-year period.

Reduce their data centers from the current number of 85 to 6 ( 3 + 3DR).

We integrated 3,500 applications,brought them down to 1,500, and reduced the number of legacy applications.

Each of these results are milestones in the industry and organizations will need to work along similar lines.Specifically getting the bulk of the resources focusing on new initiatives rather than just on maintenance.This should become the "war cry" for the customers in the industry today and they shouldn't be looking at achieving this through offshoring etc only - where the cost / spend is reduced only through wage arbitrage, I am sure the industry can think of better solutions for the same.

Source:1

Tags: hp - sap+summit+07 - it+transformation

Prashanth Rai