Under New Management

HP-Compaq has IT integration challenges, but scaling its enterprise portal isn't one of them

The ongoing merger between Hewlett-Packard and Compaq Computer Corp. raises a host of business integration issues. But among the most important for the company's 150,000 managers and employees was the fate of @HP, the enterprise portal that Hewlett-Packard launched in October 2000. (@HP received a RealWare Award for "Best Corporate Portal" from CMP Media LLC's Business Intelligence Group in 2001.) Fortunately, @HP's architecture proved to be an important factor in not only ensuring the portal's scalability but also enabling the merger itself.

Largely homegrown but utilizing elements of Epicentric Inc.'s Epicentric Foundation Server, the @HP story offers a valuable lesson: that an "outside-in" approach (see Grant Norris and David Duray's "The Outside-In Portal," Aug. 12, 2002) to portal development, in which flexibility, implementation speed, and open architecture are given priority over immediate access to back-office functionality, is a key to fast return on investment. (@HP saved the company $50 million in just six months.)

Originally developed for the purpose of employee self-service in the HR function, @HP now serves as a platform for various information-, application-, and transaction-based e-services. The service providers for @HP include functions such as HR, finance, legal, and facilities, as well as each of HP's businesses (imaging and printing, enterprise systems, HP services, and personal systems). According to @HP director Kathy Dolan, @HP receives more than 160 million hits per month, and 90 percent of all employees have logged on at least once.

Dolan believes that @HP's framework-based approach has eased many potential integration problems that would have been presented by a more stovepiped solution. In fact, @HP was available to all HP and Compaq employees on the first day of the merger.

Early in the merger process, the "Clean Room" — the small team of HP and Compaq executives who were planning the integration of their IT systems — made a series of "adopt-and-go" decisions to select which solutions would be adopted in the post-merger company. Now that this list has been finalized, Dolan's team is working with the new set of service providers to integrate with @HP. "We're there to help them understand the standards for service delivery," says Dolan, "and get those services delivered via @HP."

Dolan's team has created a series of content templates to speed the delivery of these services, she says. Most important, the consistent information architecture reflected by these templates improves the users' experience because they always know where to look for specific types of information, regardless of the service involved. Standards have also been developed for security, support, navigation, and even vocabulary.

Aside from its role as an integration framework for back-office systems, @HP has also been a factor in keeping employees informed and "empowered" by information. "One of the things we discovered early on is the role of the portal in being the authoritative source for merger information," Dolan says. "It's absolutely been a tool for enabling integration."

— Justin Kestelyn

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