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Hewlett-Packard Strategist Works on Firm's Reputation, Customer Service

Posted on: Monday, 24 February 2003, 06:00 CST

Hewlett-Packard Strategist Works on Firm's Reputation, Customer Service

Source: San Jose Mercury News

Shane Robison once turned down a job at Hewlett-Packard's research labs and chose to work at Apple Computer instead. He figured the Apple job would put him in closer touch with products and customers.

Now the 49-year-old Robison is HP's chief technology and strategy officer, and his job is to make sure the Palo Alto computer giant regains its reputation for technological leadership and solves the problems customers want addressed.

Robison must also help Chief Executive Carly Fiorina make good on her pledge that HP's purchase of Compaq Computer last year will yield technological innovations that the separate companies couldn't achieve on their own.

"A strong technology position is key to our business," said Robison, a bearded man who favors cowboy boots and raises quarter horses on a ranch in his native Utah. "Carly understands that. We have to keep our business strategy and technology strategy aligned. We have to decide where we will make our play."

Robison came from the Compaq side of the marriage, but he has quietly taken control of the combined company's technology, acquisition and investment strategies.

So far, he is untested. Since taking the HP job, he hasn't made any huge decisions, nor has he imposed any grand vision on HP, whose breadth of technologies across five product divisions makes it difficult to tie everything into a single strategy.

Instead, Robison has served as a coordinator, ensuring that the voices of HP's far-flung researchers and technology executives can be heard in upper management and across departmental lines. As a former programmer, he understands technology. As a manager, he is trying to align the company's research ideas with business realities. And when disputes occur, he arbitrates.

That is consistent with Robison's style, which he honed at top research management jobs he held at Compaq, AT&T, Cadence Design Systems and Schlumberger.

"He is setting up an infrastructure that is conducive to collaboration," said Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, a computer science professor at the University of California-Berkeley and one of Robison's advisers at HP. "He listens a lot."

Since the merger closed last spring, Robison has organized a subcommittee of the HP board to investigate technology, formed advisory boards of customers and famed technologists to offer advice about tech trends and helped HP recruit seasoned researchers like computer pioneer Alan Kay.

Robison supervises a team of technology executives from each of HP's business divisions and oversees Dick Lampman, who runs HP Labs and its 750 researchers. He directs talks regularly with his counterparts at partner companies like Intel and visits HP's customers as often as three times a week.

"Shane is not attempting to be a deep technologist in any one area," said Pat Gelsinger of Intel. "He tries to be a broad technologist who can integrate strategies."

One of Robison's most important weapons is his corporate intelligence operation, an idea imported from his Compaq days. The department's task is to collect data on rivals and share it within HP. Among the findings: HP was reasonably sure early last summer that Dell Computer would tap Lexmark as the manufacturing source for its Dell-branded line of printers.

"We have to understand where competitors are going," says Robison.

Robison also encourages researchers to share their ideas with each other. To showcase ideas from throughout the company, he is organizing an internal HP conference in April at a resort in Keystone, Colo.

HP set up the conference so that 500 researchers could attend and listen to authors present 40 to 50 papers over three days, but the company received more than 1,500 submissions from engineers in all divisions. From conferences like this, Robison believes that HP will learn "where we will place our next big bets in research."

Right now, HP is spreading its money around, making bets on everything from basic mathematics research to managing data centers. HP spent $3.3 billion, or almost 6 percent of sales, on research and development in the past fiscal year, and it ranked among the top 10 U.S. companies in patents received.

Robison says HP is big enough to be a kind of Switzerland for technology. For instance, in operating systems, HP supports Linux, Microsoft's Windows and its own HP-UX Unix software, mainly because it doesn't want to get stuck in just one technology camp.

But to some critics, HP's strategy lacks focus, forcing the company into battles with a variety of competitors, from Lexmark in printers to Dell in personal computers and IBM in high-end computing services.

To take on Dell, for instance, HP has invested in new products like the Media Center PC and the Tablet PC computers that it developed jointly with Microsoft, and it has shown off a concept of a streamlined PC that it calls the Communications PC.

At the same time, HP reserves 5 percent of its R&D for speculative projects like nanotechnology -- the manipulation of atoms to build structures -- in the hopes that it might one day pay off for HP's ink and printer businesses.

Robison says HP is putting its greatest efforts behind one big project that crosses all groups: adaptive infrastructure, a moniker for everything that the company wants to do to make life easier for the systems administrators who run complex corporate data centers. This includes research into products as diverse as printers that tell administrators when they need a refill to complex management software that can automatically assign data center computers to deal with peak loads in processing demand.

HP has preached this unified vision of computing for years, but executing it grew much more complex after the merger as HP added many more technologies to coordinate.

Robison also believes that industry trends toward open standards and high-volume production are unstoppable, and HP has to embrace these changes, not resist them.

A case in point: Robison and his HP colleagues have bet for years that Intel's 64-bit Itanium microprocessors will eventually prevail in high-end computer servers. That hasn't happened yet, but HP isn't about to start investing heavily in its own microprocessors again.

"Intel did screw up their original schedule," he said. "They fixed it and they did a lot to get back on track."

Robison's Itanium strategy is founded upon his belief that Intel will dominate microprocessors, a notion that he recognized in his first tough assignment at Compaq. Compaq had bought Digital Equipment Corp. and inherited its Alpha microprocessor architecture. Robison saw that Compaq didn't have the resources to keep investing in Alpha, so he had to figure out how to extricate Compaq from the architecture. Robison engineered a deal to turn over the Alpha design team to Intel and trade some of the Alpha technology so Intel could use it in its Itanium chip family. In exchange, Compaq received an undisclosed amount of money.

"Shane knew how to figure out the timing," said Gary Campbell, who had helped recruit Robison to Compaq and now works for him as HP's vice president of strategic architectures. "Nobody lost their job because of that transition."

Analysts have applauded Robison's foresight in his strategic retreat from Alpha, but in the case of Itanium, the outcome of HP's bet still isn't clear. That's why Robison spends much of his time keeping HP's board and its leadership informed on Itanium's progress. While the topic can be emotional, Robison gets points for being level-headed and humble.

"He is one of those rare, gifted individuals that is a brilliant technologist but also has the ability to exercise real leadership, calm, cool and collected," said George "Jay" Keyworth, a longtime member of HP's board.

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To see more of the San Jose Mercury News, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.mercurynews.com.

(c) 2003, San Jose Mercury News, Calif. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

T, CDN, HPQ

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