## Consumer Information Systems –Thriving in a Competitive Internal IT Environment

### Eric Miner

Hewlett-Packard Boise LaserJet Information Systems

The operating environment for HP’s internal Information Systems groups has changed dramatically over the past five years. Differences in markets, organizations and expectations have forced IS groups to adapt to new, highly-competitive realities or wither and die – as many have. This paper chronicles the journey of HP’s Boise Laserjet Information Systems group’s from business practices that were successful in 1993 to those needed to grow and prosper in 1998 and beyond.

In this paper I’ll follow a more-or-less chronological flow of events as follows:

The Good Old Days – BLIS in the Spring of 1993

Triggers for Change – The Factors that Pushed Us into Transition

Voyage of Discovery – Finding Our New Place in the World

Putting Things in Place – Segments & Solutions

Results – What’s Come of All this Work

Finally, I’ll talk briefly about some of the lessons we’ve learned from this experience and about next steps, our ideas for the future.

The Good Old Days – BLIS in the Spring of 1993

Life in our Information Systems has always been challenging. But the challenges of today make us remember our group’s ‘old days’ with fondness. Our place in the world five years ago was defined by the following:

- Business Environment
- HP’s laser printer business was dominant in the marketplace, with relatively little competition. Printer product life cycles were longer than they are today. Price pressures were smaller. HP laser printer divisions were experiencing rapid growth.
- Tight Business Links
- Our department was linked directly to an HP division (Boise Printer Division). As part of BPR’s Finance group, we had a clear place and mission within the BPR organization. We worked in direct support of division functions. At times we felt a bit constricted by our place – we were viewed as primarily a financial organization – but in retrospect it seems to have been secure and comfortable. Our department’s growth tracked that of our parent division.
- Functional Silos
- Our direct-support orientation meant that we were organized in functional sub-groups that matched those of our division. The people who worked in those silos were wholly dedicated to a particular type of solution (Finance, Manufacturing, etc.). Division departments looked upon IS people as ‘their’ programmers.
- Simple, Reliable Funding
- Our funding model revolved around our functional connections. Most of our funding came from yearly allocations or large allotments of money from functional managers. This funding model had served us well for many years.
- HP3000 Specialists
- Most of the applications we provided and supported were on our old, reliable platform, the HP3000. We knew this platform well and loved it. Application development on the HP3000 was our baby; no contractors or outside developers threatened to take our business away. There was some work being done on UNIX machines, and even a little on PCs, but this was a small part of our business and didn’t seem too threatening.
- One-Stop Shopping
- Our customers came to us for help. They asked for new applications or changes to old ones via a Service Request system. We put the SRs in the queue and worked our way to them. It was all very tidy.

The world seemed a pretty safe place for HP IS groups in 1993. Oh, sure, there were a few clouds of change on the horizon, but they hadn’t really reached us yet.

Triggers for Change – Factors that Pushed Us into Transition

The pace of change really picked up during that next year. By the Spring of 1994 those things that had just been faraway clouds had bloomed into full-fledged issues for our group. Most we had seen coming, a few we hadn’t. All had some effect on us, but it was the cumulative impact that really shook us. Here are the high points:

- Core App Centralization
- Many of our core, large-scale applications were being centralized to large HP Information Technology centers. The big financial applications that we had always supported for our division were moved to a large Financial Services Center. Inventory applications were moved to an Information Technology Center, which handled these and other mission-critical needs for Boise Site divisions as well as those from other cities. Other applications that had been our bread and butter followed a similar path out of our care.
- New Platforms
- Applications were moving away from HP3000. The introduction of PCs powerful enough to do ‘real’ processing, less-expensive UNIX computers, and cheap, easy-to-maintain networks were pulling mission-critical applications off our 3000s.
- Competition
- We began seeing real competition for the IS applications business. Some of it came from outside HP in the form of consultants who promised our customers they could deliver great applications quickly and at low prices. We also started seeing competition from other HP groups, including Corporate groups who had lost their own allocation-based funding and had to go after other business inside the company.
- Printer Business Environment
- The nature of the HP printer business was changing. Customers were beginning to view printers, as well as other consumer computer products, as commodities. Competition from other companies increased dramatically. HP had to adapt by decentralizing design and manufacturing, and by shifting into higher gears for R&D and Marketing. Funding and headcount tightened up.
- Bye, Bye
- Our customers were leaving us ‘because they could.’ Just as HP’s customers saw computers & peripherals as commodities, our internal customers began seeing computing applications as commodities. Tired of having to ask us for things and then wait until we could get around to them, they began buying those cheap PCs and networks and building their own solutions. They hired consultants to write applications on these platforms, and they dedicated their own resources to managing applications and information. They began telling us, "We don’t need you any more."
- R.I.P. IS
- We saw other division IS groups dying all around us. Some were absorbed into the site Information Technologies group. Some just dried up for lack of business and blew away.
- We Do What?
- Our role in enabling the HP printer business became less and less clear. With our core applications going to central facilities and our customers jumping ship for other solution providers, what value could we add? How could we contribute to HP’s business success? We didn’t know. And, in the fever to centralize and optimize and downsize, there was no one to ask. We felt lost and threatened.
- BLIS Who?
- Some of our most important customers didn’t even know who we were. As we went through our FY98 funding cycle last November, one of the new general managers, our biggest source of dollars, asked, "Who is this ‘BLIS’ group and what am I getting for all this money I’m giving them?"

It was fast becoming clear that we wouldn’t survive much longer as a group if we couldn’t define and clearly state the value we added to HP’s printer business. We felt that close IS support was important to our business but we couldn’t say why. We needed to understand our place in the world and to portray that understanding to our customers in compelling ways. And we had to position ourselves to deliver real, differentiated business value.

Voyage of Discovery – Finding Our New Place in the World

Something had to be done; the trick was finding the right place to start. We knew better than to just change things without a clear goal, but how to identify the right goal? Our management team decided to get help. They contacted an HP Corporate group that specialized in reviewing and engineering processes for other parts of the company. The Corporate folks were happy to oblige.

Three experienced reviewers conducted two days of discussions around our department’s focus, our business planning and other key processes, and participation by department members in those processes. Our reviewers were carefully picked to have a good understanding of Information Systems – its factors, traditional obstacles, major processes, etc.

We took several key points from the review:

- We had a great foundation of past successes and good people to build on. We needed to ensure that we didn’t lose our strengths in our effort to change for the better. A reviewer told us, "The strength of the team is the team."
- We needed to treat our department as its own business. "How would you run your department if it were a separate business?" We were also counseled to challenge the ‘givens’ we thought we had as an internal IS department. Too many internal departments think they have no choice in matters that restrict their ability to add business value.
- We needed to understand our processes better. One of our reviewers said, "You have processes, even if you can’t express them. Understanding and controlling those processes is your own responsibility." He added, "If you have a good worker and a bad process, the process will win every time." We also needed to figure out how to measure our processes.
- We needed to introduce more rigor into our own business planning. We were too loose and reactionary. This meant we couldn’t clearly communicate our intentions to our customers.
- We had to decide our mission. "You’re still groping a lot about who you are," one reviewer said. "It’s going to be hard to focus your resources properly until you decide what value you want to add to the business." When that question was answered we could begin strategic planning to direct our resources toward accomplishing that mission.
- It was recommended that we complement our process review with a follow-on methodology called "Building a Market-Focused Organization."

Over the next several months there followed a series of educational events meant to build our understanding of the factors we must consider as we decided how to proceed. We learned more about how to focus our work more closely to our customers’ needs. (Creating Market-Focused Products – Everest Advisory Group) We learned how to communicate and utilize differing opinions to make better decisions. (Constructive Contention – The Bay Group) And we learned how to plan more effectively at strategic as well as tactical levels (Ten-Step Business Planning – a methodology developed internally by HP).

A key insight came at this time from Treacy & Wiersema’s book, The Discipline of Market Leaders. We saw that the Treacy model applied to internal businesses (which is how we now saw ourselves) as well as companies.

The very act of discussing how we fit into the model helped us enormously in understanding ourselves. What should be our primary discipline? We quickly ruled out Operational Excellence – high volume, low-cost service delivery was the territory of the large Information Technology Centers. For a time we considered Product Leadership. But we soon realized that we weren’t positioned or structured to provide individual products superior to those of outside companies with hordes of engineers dedicated to cranking out high-quality items.

That left Customer Intimacy. The light went on.

We found that we were in a wonderful position to build a successful Customer Intimacy ‘company’ right inside HP. We had the inside track on meeting all the requirements Treacy expounded for Customer Intimate organizations:

- Unique understanding of customer needs –
As an internal organization, we were in a wonderful position to understand our customers’ ‘Hierarchy of Needs,’ as explained in Treacy’s book. Working shoulder to shoulder with them we could step right into their shoes and see their problems from a perspective very near their own. We could do this far more readily than any outside consultant or centralized IT group. And it was easier for us to maintain the kinds of long-term relationships required of Customer Intimate businesses.
- Become expert at our customers’ businesses, build superior expertise in the client’s underlying problems –
Who better than we, living as we did right with our customers, to put ourselves in their shoes? We had a far stronger opportunity to neighbor with these people than did any consultant. Our access to HP information not available to outside parties also gave us a big advantage in anticipating the issues our customers would face.
- Personalize basic services, customize products to fit customer needs, integrate products and services into tailored solutions
– Being close to our customers meant we could build a menu of services that we could quickly personalize to match their needs. We could build and find products that fit customers’ needs and customize them based on our close understanding of the business. We could offer our customers the kind of complete solutions Treacy so passionately preaches in his book.
- Ownership for customers getting the most out of our products, responsibility for results –
Again our close, continuous proximity to our customers and their business processes gave us the advantage in taking ownership for their success. We could put personalized solutions in place for them, then maintain ongoing contact to ensure they were getting all possible leverage from the dollars they’d invested with us.
- Long term support of products –
We already had a long, solid history of providing support for computing applications. Our current customers had confidence that we wouldn't let them down. We had the people, the processes, and the mechanisms in place to continue that support – a tremendous foundation on which to build support for solutions in new businesses.
- Create deep, lasting relationships –
We and our customers were in the same organizational boat. Their success or failure were very much our own. And our long years of association with them meant that many lasting relationships were already in place. Although some of those relationships needed attention and many more needed to be forged, we were confident we had the people and products necessary to forge the relationships Treacy had in mind.
- Build & exploit the Value Leadership advantage –
This factor is about the gradual change in your customers’ perception of solutions that were once leading edge but have become commodities in their eyes. As their enthusiasm for your existing products and services wanes, you’d better have other products to take their place. (Lew Platt, HP’s CEO, calls this ‘eating your own lunch before your competitors do.’) Our bright visibility of our customers’ business environment and ongoing contact with them put us in a unique position to anticipate their needs and watch their use of the solutions we provided. That meant we could put new products and services in place to maintain our differentiation over our competitors.

So it was clear we were in a great position to contribute to HP’s printer business success as a Customer Intimate supplier of information solutions. Now, according to Treacy, we had some crucial skills and behaviors to put in place.

- Broad set of skills & styles, mixture of seasoned and inventive people –
We needed to expand our old model of hiring and training software developers to include more project managers, product promoters, trainers, and other skill sets necessary to play the Customer Intimate role. We already had a good mix of experience – both seasoned veterans and new ideas, as Treacy recommends. The ongoing dynamics of our department, with people continually cycling in and out for career opportunities, played toward maintaining that mix.
- Take the long view –
Treacy says Customer Intimate organizations must "avoid or shed customers who don’t have deep relationship potential." We had to learn how to select which customers we wanted to serve and learn how to say "no" to those we didn’t. This was very hard for a department accustomed to being driven by Service Requests.
- Tremendous skill at effecting change in the customer’s organization –
For the customers we chose to serve, we needed to develop the skills necessary to help organizations move ahead. This includes developing great solutions, presenting those solutions to customers in compelling ways, and helping customers work through the painful process of changing the ways they do their work.
- Rent, rather than own many capabilities, looking for partners –
We needed to get much better at brokering and managing outside resources to provide solutions for our customers. We had some partnering experience to build from, but we needed to get better at managing both the work path and the financial aspects of contracting. We also needed to expand our repertoire of available resources – to seek out and establish relationships with partners in skills we’d never before considered.
- Throw out the not-invented-here syndrome –
For years we had specialized in building and maintaining applications by ourselves. We felt that no one could do it as well as we could. We had to overcome that notion and start seeing other solution providers, even some our competitors, as potential partners who could help us deliver the solutions our customers needed.
- Unique range of superior solutions –
The products we were developing were already superior and tailored. We needed to expand our offerings to include products from other sources to expand our ability to help our customers. We had to see our work in terms of overall solutions to customers’ business need. And we had to fit our solutions so tightly to those needs that our customers would clearly see that they couldn’t get this kind of quality, ownership, and follow-through from anyone else.

We also brought the people of our organization together to help us understand how to implement Treacy’s ideas. The department divided into teams to discuss the shape of the organization, the skills needed, and other considerations. The teams’ recommendations were passed to the management team for integration into our overall plan.

Putting Things in Place – Segments & Solutions

Finally, in the Summer of 1996 all our work came together in the FY1997 BLIS Business Plan. This 58-page document was our value statement; it laid out who we were and what we planned to do for the next three years. It was built directly around the Ten Step Planning process, with a separate section for each step prescribed in the Ten Step methodology. In it our customers and, indeed, our own department people could find clearly enumerated all the key elements of how BLIS was going to add value to HP’s printer business. Some key points:

- A Clear Statement of Purpose –
Where we publicly declared that our department focus was on Customer Intimacy, with all it entailed. We also reinforced our information technology orientation and stated that we would serve LaserJet business information needs worldwide.
- 3-Year Objectives –
Our objectives focused on business alignment, breakthroughs in information management, and earning 100% of our customers’ IS investments. (Note: if a customer had IS needs that were outside our expertise we would secure and manage resources to put the solution in place so the customer didn’t have to.)
- Customer Needs Segments –
This was our representation of our customers’ information needs as we understood them. The needs, not departments or even the customers themselves, were divided into three segments: Product Generation, Demand Fulfillment, and Organizational Communication. These segments freely crossed functional boundaries and a person in LSG might have needs that fell within two or more segments.
- Customer Alternatives –
Our acknowledgement of the fact that our customers had lots of choices of places to get information solutions. We went so far, in fact, as to list out the strengths and issues of each alternative our customers had.
- Product Profiles –
Here we built our own picture of the ideal future state for each customer segment. We showed clusters of needs and associated solutions (we called them products at this point to keep things understandable for our customers), whether the solutions already existed or were planned for the future. This section resonated with our customers because they could readily see the depth of understanding we had for their business and information needs, and they could see the solutions we had to serve those needs. Connected to each profile was a Vintage Chart showing when we wanted to deliver those solutions.
- Organizational Design –
We laid out a new organization for BLIS. This organization was built around customer needs segments rather than the old functional silos. This meant our people delivered similar, tailored, leveraged solutions for a whole segment instead of being ‘wholly-owned resources’ for a single functional area. BLIS people had more product focus in the near term and a wider selection of solution building experiences in the long term. (More about this organization below.)
- Partner Dependencies –
We listed those organizations we knew we would have to partner with to be successful. This also included the main themes to be explored with each partner.
- Project Plans –
We listed the projects we planned for FY97, whether they were funded at the time of the BLIS Business Plan’s release or not.

The 1997 Business Plan was a potent tool for us. Each member of the BLIS department got one. It was the centerpiece for discussions around directions and tactics that year. It served as the anchor for organizational changes within the department and as the basis for resource and financial planning. We distributed it to our customers and partners. It became the foundation for discussions about the number and kinds of solutions we would deliver for the year.

Of particular interest for this discussion was the Organizational Design. BLIS was still organized into groups for manageability, but these groups were dedicated to collections of related customer business needs called segments. (See the diagram below.) Our three segments were Product Generation, Demand Fulfillment, and Infrastructure Segments. Where before our people focused on a particular function-oriented computing area (i.e. Finance or Shipping applications), now they were given a group of customers whose needs might span several functional boundaries. Demand Fulfillment, for example, includes Finance, international Manufacturing, Shipping, Order Processing, and Inventory Tracking needs.

This new organization changed the focus for our BLIS people from functions & systems to customers & needs.

Getting closer to the customers and understanding their businesses and information needs is crucial to the Customer Intimate focus. We felt that this effort required more attention than the segment managers could devote so new Segment Lead positions were created. Segment Leads work closely with customers to quantify their information needs and relate those needs to possible Information Technology solutions. The Lead builds solution project proposals for the customer and BLIS management. Approved projects are turned over to Project Leads in BLIS. Project Leads form teams of engineers to deliver the needed solutions. The teams work closely with customers to define solutions rigorously, build them, put them in place, and train their users. The Segment Lead monitors the whole solution-delivery process to ensure customer satisfaction and to cultivate the ongoing relationship with that customer.

COIL-USD – The Whole-Product Experience

Long-term support for information solutions delivered by BLIS is done by our Current Product Support group. As a solution project nears completion the project team works with CPS to pass the solution for support. Obviously, CPS’s service critically affects the customer relationship, so CPS engineers work with the Segment Leads to keep the satisfaction level high. Of particular interest is the composition of CPS. Instead of having our customers outsource their computing support, we outsource it for them. In essence we replaced ourselves with contractors in this function. Our CPS people work with local software contracting companies to supply and manage support activities of sixteen contractors. This allows us to provide solution support for the best possible price. It also frees up scarce HP resources for solution development.

Our CPS group took a lesson in customer satisfaction from our LSG Marketing people. Seeing their efforts to make LaserJet customers’ experiences with their printers more satisfying, we tried to look at the complete, cradle-to-grave experience our customers were having with BLIS products.

We use the acronym COIL-USD to help us visualize the customer’s total experience with our products. This stands for:

- Choose
– Promote the acceptance and use of BLIS information solutions in LSG. Compose and distribute compelling materials to make people aware of BLIS, our products, and our services. It’s important to note that, in a Customer Intimate organization, ‘Choose’ also includes actively seeking ways to be of further service to our customers. This can mean leveraging existing solutions and identifying new ways to apply Information Technologies to customers’ business needs.
- Order
– Establish easy, quick mechanisms for ordering BLIS solutions. Promote their use by BLIS customers.
- Install
– Establish easy mechanisms for installing BLIS solutions in LSG. (Example: direct installation from a Web page.) Make ordering and installing BLIS solutions as easy as falling off a log.
- Learn
– Help customers learn to use BLIS information solutions effectively. Ensure that BLIS customers get the most from the solutions we provide. Choose and implement learning tools and mechanisms (including training) in the most efficient, most effective ways possible.
- Use
– The customer’s ongoing relationship with the solution should be satisfying and beneficial. This element also includes efforts to encourage customers’ increased use of BLIS solutions, as appropriate.
- Support
– Support should be personal and comprehensive. We’re supporting people here, not applications.
- Dispose
– When the time comes, disposal of the solution should be coordinated and without pain. Transitions to replacement solutions should be assisted.

In a Customer Intimate relationship, opportunities exist for the solution supplier in every one of these components of the customer’s experience.

We in CPS felt we had a sound grasp of Support. Now we needed to branch out into the other elements of COIL-USD. An engineer was dedicated to the oft-neglected task of disposing of solutions properly. This person makes the necessary arrangements for closing down applications properly, ensuring that all old links are deleted and ongoing information needs accommodated through other solutions.

Choose, Order, Install & Learn – Acting in Our New Roles

It’s nice to know who you are and that you’re good at what you do, but you won’t survive long if both current and potential customers don’t know, as well. This was brought home to us in spades when, during the Autumn of 1997, we found that some of our most important funding sources, general managers in new divisions, didn’t even know who we were.

So there it was. BLIS was just another vendor in a very competitive pond. We had all the challenges of any company struggling to differentiate themselves from their competition. And were our customers going to make any special effort to learn about us? Of course not – they were busy running businesses of their own.

We had to tell people about ourselves!

In the past we had always depended on our spot in the organization to bring us business. When people needed information systems they came to IS. Of late we had assumed that new business would just automatically come to us if we did a good job on the old. Well, it just ain’t so.

Getting the word out on how good your solutions are requires time, money and resources, just like any other marketing effort. You can’t just assume your customers are going to tell each other. In fact, you can’t just assume that the customer you helped last week will choose you for their next solution. You have to keep reminding them about how well you do things, educating them about all the good things you have to offer, keep your name in front of them so they know who to call.

We use all the standard tools one uses for any marketing effort:

- Pamphlets & Fliers
– All the standard paper forms used to spread information. The pieces that work well internally are the same as anywhere else – bi-folds, tri-folds, and letter-size fliers.
- Web Pages
– These are becoming more and more accepted, in fact, expected, as information mechanisms for internal customers. Our next step for these is to make them a primary mechanism for the whole COIL process. Users should be able to easily Choose, Order, Install and Learn products directly from the Web page.
- Business Plan
– Copies distributed to our customers help them to understand the value we propose to add to their business, the tools & mechanisms we’ll use to do so, and the people they need to work with to make it all happen. Their understanding of us is as important as our understanding of them.
- Product Fairs
– These are on-site displays of the work we do. We choose a large room in a high-traffic location (right off the cafeteria, in our case), publicize the location and date for two weeks before, and decorate the room to attract people to it. We arrange display and demonstration stations so people can scan them quickly to find the ones they are interested in, and populate the stations with BLIS engineers and happy customers of whom people can ask questions. And we give the visitors cake and punch.
- Success Stories/Testimonials
– When a solution you’ve supplied works well for a customer, you have to tell all your other customers about your success. These can be posted on your Web site, included in site newsletters, and handed out with other product documentation.

One note here. We’ve found that we have to be subtler in our internal product marketing efforts than for outside products. Our internal customers are very sensitive about us spending their dollars promoting our own department. This means we’re not as vocal or as visual in our approach, and we use tools that are generally recognized as being less expensive. (Example: brochures and posters are generated with PCs, printers and plotters located within our department.)

Our partner in this endeavor is a small, local company that combines text editing and graphic arts services. In an interesting turn, they have established a long-term relationship with our group, worked to understand our needs, and supplied complete solutions at a premium price. In short, they’ve worked to be a Customer Intimate supplier of editing and graphics services for us.

On the Install/Learn side, we are working on mechanisms that will make it easier for customers to bring BLIS solutions into their own workplace. We are particularly interested in easy installation of BLIS products from our Web page. We want our customers to be able to choose, order, and install a product quickly and easily from the same page. We are also expanding our user learning efforts, upgrading the training and printed help that are part of the ‘total solution’ to a customer’s information need.

Once we had made the commitment to proactively learn about, order and receive our products and services, it quickly became evident that this work required more than just part-time commitment. The BLIS management team decided to dedicate a person full time to COIL. In fact, the role has now become large enough that we are expanding it to two people. One will specialize in Choose/Order and the other in Install/Learn, although both will participate in all four activities, as need dictates.

Results

While other Information Systems departments in HP have withered and died, BLIS has grown from 32 people serving two division in 1993 to 61 people (37 of whom are HP) serving the whole LaserJet Solutions Group today. Our relationships with our customers grow stronger with each solution delivered.

Examples of solutions we have supplied or are working on include:

- Product Generation Solutions –
Post-shipment quality tracking, software & firmware defect tracking, product document information, world-wide materials tracking, and information tracking between HP and our manufacturing partners.
- Demand Fulfillment Solutions –
Master planning, allocation, inventory control, financial reporting, sales information, and materials tracking.
- Organizational Communication –
Applications to help teams store, manage, and share information important to their success.

(Note: The Intranet Distribute and Print segment is also addressing a second group of needs. Most of our initial efforts were around supplying solutions to large, strategic information needs. We found that there was considerable market for smaller solutions. The needs of these customers were shorter term, and thus didn’t lend themselves to the Customer Intimacy model. But the customers involved felt they had nowhere to go to get these needs met, and our management team came to consider these opportunities a good way to establish relationships that could later lead to larger, more long-term solution efforts.)

Lessons Learned

So we’ve gone through all this effort and seen success. What lessons can we share to help others searching for success in the competitive world in internal Information Systems?

- Delivering Business Results –
This is what it all comes down to. It’s not enough just to deliver products. You have to deliver complete solutions to customer business needs that make a demonstrable contribution to the customer’s business success.
- Defining and Demonstrating that Value –
It’s your responsibility! You have to determine the need and how you’ll address it with the tools at your disposal. You then have to portray that determination in compelling ways to those that are going to pay. And you have to do it over and over throughout the life of the project.
- Justifying Your Existence –
Is also your responsibility. You have to do it year after year. It takes time and resources. To expect others to see how valuable you are is to invite disaster.
- Clear Value Proposition –
It’s an absolute must. Whatever framework you couch it in (Treacy, etc.), it has to be clear, succinct, and understandable to those who pay the bills.

- If You Choose Customer Intimacy –
There are some things to keep in mind:

- It’s not enough just to say it
– You have to learn what Customer Intimacy really means. This understanding has to permeate your whole organization. Everything you do has to hearken back to it. Metrics and behaviors have to reinforce your Customer Intimacy focus.
- You’re not dealing with ‘groups,’ or ‘teams,’
– You’re dealing with individuals who want their needs to be met.
- You have to go to your customers
– You can’t wait for them to come to you any more. We’ve done this with Segment Leads. We’ve done this with improved training. We’ve done this with Product Awareness (more about this below). In a few cases we’ve place engineers in customer areas. You learn their business. You propose the solutions. You propose follow-on solutions.
- High quality solutions balance many components
– You have to provide great Information Technology, great coordination, great training & documentation, and great follow-through to please today’s IS customer. Then you have to quickly identify ways to leverage what you’ve learned and do it again.
- You’ve got to have partners
– An IS department can’t do it all alone. You have to partner with contractors, central IT groups, outside companies, whoever has what your customers need. Then you package up the whole thing and deliver it.
- You’ve got to learn new stuff
– Doing this well took new expertise for us, and it will almost certainly take new expertise for any IS group. You have to either learn it yourself or buy it from outside. We had to learn a great deal to do both. This process will continue forever.

- Welcome Back –
We found that many of our established customers were glad to see us revitalized. They had struggled with the pain of supporting Web pages and other applications built by their own people who then moved to other jobs, or by contractors who finished the contracted work and then disappeared. This ‘build and abandon’ methodology left them with a set of unconnected, unsupported islands of technology that degraded over time. These customers were looking for partners who would supply complete, integrated solutions, not just discreet applications, and then support them for the long term.

Next Steps

As in any other business, there’re plenty of places for us to spend our efforts. Of course, we can’t let ourselves slip in producing high-quality information solutions for our customers – our bread-and-butter business. But we also must improve our Customer Intimate standing with our customers to continue to thrive. To that end we’ve chosen the following goals:

- Greater Understanding of Business & Info Needs –
Adding to our knowledge of our customers’ business environments and the information & tools they need to secure business success.
- Greater Utilization of BLIS Solutions –
Promote greater use of BLIS solutions. This means increased use of exiting solutions by current customers and finding new customers for these solutions. It also means identifying new opportunities in which BLIS can provide solutions to customers’ business information needs.
- Promote Understanding of Customer Intimacy Practices
– Among our BLIS personnel. Help them know how to apply these practices to improve our relationships with our customers and the solutions we provide.
- Promote Relationships –
Build Customer Intimate relationships with existing and new customers. We need to learn more about how these relationships work and expend more effort turning our solution delivery experiences into long-term relationships.
- Publish BLIS Successes –
Let our customers know what we, and they, are doing around creating and utilizing business information solutions. Document and publish success stories. Credit those who’ve done well with our solutions.
- Improved Mechanisms for Choosing, Ordering, Installing & Learning BLIS Solutions –
Continue our work to make it easier for our customers to select BLIS solutions and integrate them into their work. Provide better training and user documentation.
- Reinforce Understanding of BLIS’s Role in HP’s Printer Business –
Capture our role in this business. Present that role to our customers in compelling ways. Use this understanding to expand that role, as appropriate, to allow us to make the greatest possible contribution to business goals.

The Future’s So Bright . . .

We in BLIS are proud of the progress we’ve made over the past five years. It hasn’t been an easy journey by any means, but our role in HP’s printer business is once again clear, our customers are excited about the solutions we’re providing, and our opportunities as a department are greater than they have been in years.

Now it just remains for us to deliver on those opportunities.