Midsize Enterprise Summit: HP Lives By The 'Keep It Simple' Rule

Under the leadership of CEO Mark Hurd and CIO Randy Mott, HP shed its excess pounds and now oversees 500 IT projects, less than 1,800 applications and 17,000 servers, said Randy Baklini, enterprise architect at HP.

"Keep it tight. Keep it right. It's not about making choices," he said. "Most businesses can run with 20 percent of the software: billing, accounts receivable, some sort of customer management and supply chain [software]. And a little bit of something that makes you different."

HP also wanted to make sure it was spending in the right places. "Do you make money on compliance? Why would you want to put compliance on disaster recovery?" he asked. "You don't have to have disaster recovery for Sarbanes-Oxley, but if your supply chain's down that's a big deal."

Using portfolio-management software and skills, HP determined what it had, what it needed and cut inefficient or too-costly processes, he said. The company set strict standards with no exceptions, said Baklini. "We're in this mess of consolidation, virtualization and sprawl because we [IT people] want to help everybody," he said.

Back in 2005, when the transformation process began, HP had 50,000 home users, all of whom purchased books and office supplies when and where they wanted. In addition, HP had to process and reimburse these expense accounts at a cost of about $2 million a year, said Baklini to a gathering of Midsize Enterprise Summit attendees.

Creating an employee procurement Web site gave employees access to HP's preferred pricing and eliminated these expense reports, he noted, saving HP $2 million in its first year.

HP also eliminated duplication throughout its operations, generating a centralized budget, centralized procurement and a cost-benefit analysis for everything that costs more than $200,000, he