Computerworld - Eight months after assuming the dual positions of CIO and executive vice president of global operations at Hewlett-Packard Co., Gilles Bouchard was in about as unenviable a position as a CIO can find himself. His CEO, Carly Fiorina, announced that HP had "executed poorly" on an order-processing and supply chain systems migration (see story). And Fiorina blamed the execution problems for a $400 million revenue shortfall that, in turn, contributed to the enterprise server and storage group's third-quarter revenue drop of 5% in comparison with the same quarter a year earlier.
Last week, Bouchard spoke candidly with Computerworld about what it was like to be in the hot seat as three other company executives paid for the poor quarterly showing with their jobs.
Given that you're directly responsible for HP's supply chains and IT systems, what was your role in the failed ERP migration? I got this job in December, and in the following four or five months, what I didn't want to do was merge business and IT just at the corporate level. I wanted to also merge it in the field, in each region and each country. That's what we put together in the early part of the year. A lot of the pieces of the supply chain, order management and IT were in different businesses. Bringing those things together into one operation became official on May 1.
This [ERP migration] problem broke out three weeks later in the Americas region. It was one of many transitions we had done, and are still doing, where we simplify our portfolio of ERPs. This was the 35th transition we had done of ERPs; 34 had gone well, and this one did not go well.
What went wrong? It's a lot of little things that added up. Not one or two of them would have created the problem, but the combination of them created a bigger problem than we expected. We had planned for three weeks of disruption, and there were six weeks of disruption.
HP CIO Gilles Bouchard
These problems are in three major categories. One we call working across silos. The team that was driving this [consolidation] program had to work with other parts of the company -- they were dependent on other parts. And working across these seams proved difficult. People have different priorities, so it made program management a little more complex. For example, logistics was in a different group, and the front-end order-taking was in a different system, hosted in a different group. So there were
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