Technology evangelism continued to take a lot of time and effort in 2002. I made trips to Orlando, New York City, Washington, DC, San Diego, Faro (Portugal), Singapore, the Bay Area, Cologne, Lisbon, and Barcelona promoting HP's printing and imaging technology and the Internet Imaging Model transformation.
Meanwhile, we were fully engaged in the battle for open imaging standards. We were fighting Epson's false PIM claims while working with companies in the US and Japan to create what became the free and open digital imaging exchange standard called EXIF-Print. That was eventually finalized and promoted by Japan's JCIA/CIPA and all of its member companies (including Epson). I traveled to Tokyo (three times), Rochester, the Bay Area, Sarasota, Orlando, Redmond, San Diego, and Boise working to gain agreement from everyone inside and outside HP to make this happen. In the end, we won this battle.
While working on technology evangelism and gaining agreement on open elements of our Internet Imaging Model architecture, we met another challenge from VJ. He asked Lee's team to give a third leg to what he felt was a "two-legged stool" business. VJ had products and supplies, but he didn't have services/solutions. VJ was getting a lot of pressure about this from Carly. It had accelerated with the Compaq merger as that had caused Carly and the HP Executive Council to demand more and more of our IPS profits to prop up losses and low margins in the rest of HP.
Lee hired two former colleagues as consultants to help us create an IPS Services plan. These guys had launched IBM Global Services and knew the business very well. We developed a taxonomy of about a dozen different service business models complete with revenue and margin intervals for each one. A key point of emphasis was that success would depend on HP's willingness to serve customers rather than use a services business as just another channel for HP products. In the long run, this has been difficult for all of HP - not just the printing and imaging business. But we did successfully launch the HP Managed Print Services which measures success based on services revenue and which provides outsourcing service for a corporations total printing operation (independent of printer brands). My work on this initiative required frequent PDX-BOI trips, and I set up a second office in Boise.
On a trip to Boise in April, Lee told me that he was going to resign from HP. I think he believed that he had met his goals with us. It was time for him to move on now that Carolyn was gone and now that VJ was in charge. I was quite sad. For a couple of months, I was the acting CTO while VJ searched for Lee's replacement. My new boss was announced before too long. Frank Cloutier was the new IPG (IPS became Imaging & Printing Group) Chief Technology Officer.
Frank was a strong supporter of my team's goals, and we had a good relationship from the start. He remembered my earlier willingness to challenge the HP status quo in favor of innovation. If there are just two things that set Frank apart as CTO, they were innovation and the fact that he was VJ's guy. Frank would end up favoring working on innovation for VJ over working on any of the many HP corporate distractions that would come along.
Carly had hired Rich DeMillo to be HP's first official CTO. Rich had assembled the various HP business CTOs into a Technology Council that was a convenient place for information sharing and initiative launching but that had no authority or funding for execution of plans. It was up to individual businesses to fund and execute the initiatives the Rich and other corporate people came up with. Needless to say, not much was accomplished. Lee frequently asked me to sit in for him on these things, and I was able to learn a lot about the rest of HP and to gain exposure to HP's most senior technology leadership - including people like Shane Robison who arrived from Compaq.
In May, the Compaq merger was complete, and the "new HP" emerged. Shane Robison became the new HP CTO. Shane quickly moved to have all of the senior CTOs report directly to him, and he formed the Office of Strategy and Technology with funding, with authority, and with headcount. Although my new boss, Frank Cloutier, would report to Shane, my funding continued to come from VJ and IPG.
Frank was much like Lee in one sense. He trusted and supported me, my team, and my initiatives completely. But he also added a few of his own goals to my list, and my year(s) of major multitasking became even more intense.
I was chosen to co-chair HP Tech Con 2003. The idea of a competitive internal technology conference wasn't new, but we had never had one at HP. When Shane was at Cadence, Patrick Scaglia had helped him create the concept that we ended up using for HP Tech Con. Patrick was an HP Labs Center Director and was a confidant of Shane. When I was asked to co-chair Tech Con, I had my first interaction with Patrick. He would later become my boss.
Along with my co-chairs, Alan Nemeth (formerly Digital Equipment then Compaq) and John Meyer (HP Labs), we put out a call for abstracts and worked with others on the Steering Committee to lay plans for the conference to be held in Keystone, CO, in 2003. We established a limit of 40 formal presentations and 90 posters. We had no idea how many abstracts to expect or how many reviewers to recruit. We were completely overwhelmed when more than 1400 abstracts were submitted. Those numbers (40/90 and 1400-1600 abstracts) would remain constant throughout the following 10 year Tech Con run. It fell on the three co-chairs to do triage on the abstract submissions. We each took about 500 of them and spent our Thanksgiving holidays reading and sorting them. In the end, we managed to create a superb conference program that became the model for Tech Con in the years ahead.
A few other things are worth noting from 2002. We completed work to convince HP to acquire Indigo. HP's intentions around digital commercial printing were no longer a mystery. We announced a DPS (Direct Print Service) standard for digital imaging along with other imaging leader companies. This was a follow-on to EXIF-Print that my team and I drove. HP introduced Photo REt IV, and I promoted it as a key part of technology evangelism. Our R&D teams had developed smaller and smaller drops, higher density six-ink writing systems, and the ability to do "color layering" of up to about 1.2 million different colors per pixel for more realistic photography. By design, my team had grown smaller by the end of 2002 to minimize HP overhead while maximizing CTO span and influence. The handful of people reporting to me were very senior technologists. Mark Gorzynski had reported to me for several years as HP's best imaging scientist. Under the new OS&T, his Color Strategy Council became HP-wide. Bob Taylor was one of HP's best systems and services architects and also ran our IPG Standards Council. Jack Holm was a world-renowned color scientist working with Adobe, Microsoft and others. We rotated the best and brightest through our office as initiatives were launched. Life at HP was still very good with Shane and Frank and VJ as leaders, but my own role had certainly changed a lot in ten years.
Next: 2003: International Collaboration
No comments:
Post a Comment