Organizational Advantages

Abstract

In the mid-1990s, Hewlett-Packard was a very decentralized company, and IT was especially decentralized. At the time, HP had 150 data centers located around the world. Many of these data centers were owned and managed by HP businesses or factory sites, and only grudgingly did they interact with the broader HP. While there was a central corporate IT function located in Palo Alto, California, it only occasionally impacted the rest of the myriad HP IT organizations. Sometimes, that interaction was decreed (only TCP/IP would be used on internal networks, single e-mail systems, etc.), and sometimes corporate could only suggest (desktop application standards, PC hardware).