The Cloud is in many ways a reengineering platform. Technology reengineering in the form of trading proprietary data centers and help desks for those remote. Financial reengineering in trading IT capex for opex.

But for the most part companies have stayed away from large business process engineering projects around cloud implementations. Part of the reason is the reengineering around ERP packages in the 90s turned out to be unwieldy projects with expensive change management consultants and poor payback. With many companies taking a cautious approach to cloud computing, they did not want to increase risk by also tinkering too much with business process change. 

Given this, I have been pleasantly surprised to see the operational transformation at HP. Even on a normal day running a $ 120 billion company with over 300,000 employees in 170 countries is a daunting task. Add to that all the distractions from the well publicized issues at the company, and yet HP is:

a) going big with cloud applications – it is poised to be the largest salesforce.com implementation in the world. And also the largest Workday (for HR functions), Fieldglass (for contract labor procurement) and DocuSign (for electronic contracts) implementation. Many other applications are being planned to be migrated to the cloud

b) doing significant process reengineering exercise around the cloud implementation. This is not totally unsurprising as the executive driving the project, John Hinshaw, holds the title of EVP Global Technology AND Business Processes.

The salesforce.com implementation has been driven by the need to provide the customer a more unified view across HP’s multiple business units – data center services, printers, software etc. The project is breaking down silos – so contracts, contacts, commissions will be in one place – needing better integration of sales with legal, HR, contingent labor procurement and with countless channel partners. It is also  providing better transparency to management across the sales and reseller channels.

In a webinar this week (you can watch the webinar here video), Daryl Ganas, Director of Sales Operations at HP  described the business angles of the transformation project. He covered many points including:

• Homogenization of the customer experience across products – as he put it customers keep asking  “Please come to us as one HP”
• Standardization of processes across divisions and geographies
• Leveraging  HP’s massive economies of scale to the benefit of its partner ecosystem
• Automating the (complex) product configuration, pricing and customer quote process
• Integrating the customer quote and sales compensation process
• Giving the salesperson tools to evolve his/her profile (in the first half of the webinar, Brent Adamson of CEB described his firm’s research which shows various salesperson profiles – the Challenger, the Lone Wolf etc – and the survey results which show superior results with the Challenger profile )  

 More impressively, learning from the failures of the 90s, the implementation and reengineering is not sacrificing speed. In one of the slides Daryl Ganas presented you can see the rapid user ramp across the globe and the multiple releases delivered. 

John Hinshaw provides more of a business perspective 

“ When we would sign up a new reseller, it used to take five weeks in the whole transaction process. Now it’s five days. HP Financial Services would take two or three days of paperwork back and forth. Now it’s 10 minutes.”

Yes, the cloud has matured to the point where complex organizations can attempt far more complex process transformation projects around it.

Vinnie Mirchandani, writes books and blogs on how technology is helping us innovate work, life and play. He has  a keen eye for “ahas” across industries and countries and his blog New Florence. New Renaissance. catalogs over 500 entries a year on innovative projects, products, places and people.