Capitalize on Business Information. Put It to Work. HP’s Adaptive Approach to Enterprise Content Management

So much information, so little time. Ever-increasing need to do more with less. Change, and even more change. Organizations that span countries, multiple companies, multiple business units, multiple partners. Mergers and acquisitions. Changing customer expectations. And on top of all this we are rapidly moving to a digital, mobile and virtual world.

So what should you do to take advantage of these changes? And how? To help you solve your content and information management problems in this ever-changing world, we'd like to share with you how HP's adaptive, holistic approach to Enterprise Content Management (ECM) has worked for us and our customers.

ECM Within HP: A Case Study
HP is a Fortune 11 company with annual revenues in excess of $86 billion. We have more than 21,000 patents, and last year introduced 650 new products. We have 150,000 employees doing business in more than170 countries around the world, serving millions of people who use HP technologies. We provide products, solutions and services that include imaging and printing devices, PCs and mobile computing devices, servers, storage and software, as well as managed services and consulting and integration.

To succeed we need to make it easy for all our customers to do business with us. At the same time, we also need to comply with regulations both locally and globally, and continue to be cost effective.

Like most companies, HP had complex, spaghetti-like communications channels, built out from a lot of departmental content solution deployments that were fairly fragmented, and suffered from redundancy and inefficiencies. HP's merger with Compaq only increased the complexity. We knew we needed to streamline and consolidate our content management globally, and execute our vision of "Create once, use many, consistently and fast."

So what did we do? We created a global digital content management infrastructure, together with revised business processes, to connect HP content owners with content consumers in a consistent and scalable way. We rationalized taxonomies, metadata, technologies and management approaches across 17 global business units. Our primary content outlets are HP websites, although we use the same tools and processes for paper-based publishing. The deployment touches over 85% of the products we sell, yet the practices we used are relevant to organizations of any size, and are in fact used by our consultants when they implement solutions for our customers.

And what have we achieved? For our sales and marketing function alone, we:

• Reduced cost of management infrastructure (business and IT) by more than 50% in 30 months;
• Increased the number of customer catalogs syndicated weekly by more than 1,000% in 24 months;
• Reduced the cost per new product introduction by 69%;
• Translated more than 90 million words per year into more than 36 local languages, and that number is growing; savings equal more than $15 million per year;
• Serve more than 13,000 sales and marketing users; and
• Manage more than 1.8 million sales and marketing documents.

What did we learn?

• It's all about business and IT—the people, organizations, business processes, policies and technology;
• Communicate, sell internally and deliver short-term gains in ramping up to critical mass;
• Treat ECM as an integral part of the overall enterprise information management strategy;
• Scalability is a must, and needs to be established and designed in from the outset;
• Select projects with the highest returns to implement first; and
• Work with business units to carry out needs assessments, alignment with strategic goals and business value of their prioritized projects.

How Did We Do It? The Adaptive Enterprise Approach
We manage ourselves as an "adaptive enterprise," which enables us to rapidly adapt to change. Because we have synchronized business processes and IT, we can respond quickly to changing customer demands and requirements, market conditions and technologies. The following are the four key design principles we use for all our IT projects, applying them consistently across business processes, applications and infrastructure:

• Simplification—Simplify applications and systems to reduce complexity and risk;
• Standardization—Standardize the way IT assets are used with common components and processes;
• Modularity—Improve performance by managing infrastructure components discretely or collectively; and
• Integration—Easily manage and modify the environment through a uniform system of relationships.