Feb 16th 2004, a day I will always cherish, this
was the day when I joined Hewlett Packard a now it’s been a decade long journey
of bringing business and IT together.
My life in consulting started with HP and I believe this was
the major breakthrough in my career, in the very early days I got an opportunity
to work with the best of the leaders and mentors where I learned to excel in
the consulting assignments being inclusive with all other management frameworks.
This was the time when I was introduced into the world of Enterprise
Architecture.
While there are hundreds of definitions of enterprise
architecture, and each company adds its own flavour in this blog let me stick
with the definition provided by Gartner.
“Enterprise
architecture (EA) is the process of translating business vision and strategy
into effective enterprise change by creating, communicating, and improving the
key principles and models that describe the enterprise’s future state and
enable its evolution”
This was the time when HP and Compaq merged into one and my initial
days in this role were spent on engaging with leaders and draw communications
to Initiate change from the top and remove barriers. Building out the
foundation for execution requires investments in IT infrastructure, and as HP –
Compaq came together I was working with the leaders who planned to build their
foundations one project at a time, funding mechanisms often limit important
investments in infrastructure and so was in this case too. When I look back
today I believe I could have contributed a lot more… alas..! this is what experience
is all about; it was the very beginning for me to understand how processes
become complex when status quo gets challenged and the mergers often take its
own time to stabilize before it starts performing.
I got an opportunity to work with a very polished leader,
who stepped in and made it happen. Experimentation was the way, there is
nothing right and wrong, you simply follow the PDSA (Plan, Do, Study, Act) cycles
before coming up with the final process that will be digitized and take baby
steps across the business before building the blueprint and gather buy in from
all the stakeholders involved post which the architecture gets drawn, the IT collaborates
with the business and decides on the technology suite which becomes the integral
part supporting the day to day business operations the organization carries
out.
Risk, Disaster recovery, IT Security, Web etc… were very new
terms in those days, Cloud computing was in its infancy, the talk of the town
revolved round the servers, this was the era when use architecture as a compass
and communication tool to draw right investments and build the funding
structure emerged.
I was a part of the team whose agenda was to identify the
small set of key IT-related capabilities (IT-enabled processes, shared
databases, standardized platforms) that are most critical to the company's
operations. We all learn from mistakes, and our team too committed few, the kind
of enthusiasm in us created a rush to move on to the next project without
ensuring that the organization is deriving the benefits from the last project,
here is when I learnt Enterprise architecture maps a path in which a company
incrementally builds and then leverages capabilities.
I was then introduced to the world of Six Sigma, the strengthening
rupee and the weakening dollar in India added a lot of pressure to the IT
organization and there was quite a huge cost optimization drive, Consolidating
servers, renegotiating contracts, introducing offshore outsourcing, and
installing financial discipline, driving series of Six Sigma projects on the floor
at all levels and the entire focus shifted from the top line to the operations
and this showed up on the bottom line. While the EBITDA for our P&L was +ve
the margins were very poor compared to the previous years, it was a time when
the salary hikes to employees were –ve and it was required to rethink how to maneuver
further.
We had a leader who built a team called Excelartors which
stood for Excellence + Acceleration, this team was handpicked from each of the business
unit with a focus on enabling core activities and providing useful data that can
improve efficiency and creativity of the company's people coupled with rewards
for enterprise wide thinking. Each leader drew a business plan and how it can collaborate
with IT, data and metrics played a very interesting role, new dimension of the
business shaped up which was supported by the IT. Various TCE&Q (Total
Customer Experience and Quality) initiatives were led which I was a part of and
the energy resonated in each of the top leader I did interact with. Smaller
groups functioned and the execution was carried out seamlessly. A lot of work
was also outsourced with Wipro who helped enable the business with digitizing
the balance scorecard and analytics.
What I learnt at HP about EA can be summarized looking at
this simple video on youtube
