Innovation is where businesses should be investing in to succeed, rather than spending on IT maintenance and keeping the status quo. That was the message that HP's Executive Vice-President and CIO Mr Randy Mott gave when he was in Singapore recently as part of IDA's Distinguished IT Speaker Series.

According to Mr Mott, IT employment levels in the United States are at an all-time high despite the amount of off-shoring to countries like India and China. Unfortunately, he says that the majority of these people are involved in the support of IT rather than being involved in innovation and deciding new IT initiatives.

Mr Randy Mott determined to drive innovation at HP

As the CIO of HP, Mr Mott is driving this concept within the company, to keep it focused on innovation. HP intends to retire their older legacy systems by automating some functions. "You've got to measure, as a company, how much time is being spent on support," Mr Mott said, adding that HP has put about 60% of their staff on innovation and he hopes to further increase this percentage over the next few years.

Part of the transformation of HP Mr Mott is overseeing is a three-year initiative to consolidate HP's 85 data centres into six larger centres. This includes reducing HP's server farm by 30%, cutting networking costs by 50% and cutting legacy applications by 60%.

HP hopes that this consolidation will lead to an increase in processing power of 80% and bandwidth capacity growth of 30%. Cost savings from the data centre consolidation along with HP's other initiatives to reform its IT operations are estimated to be over US$1 billion.

Mr Mott shared his more than 20 years of experience with the audience

HP's IT team will continue to be a global team and work on key collaboration sites, one of which is Singapore, as they look to increase development (versus support) and increase innovation within the company. Mr Mott says that the company remains dedicated in providing world-class IT in terms of governance, control, procurement processes etc. to customers, whether they are consumers, businesses or governments.

Mr Mott also said that while innovation would be the key driver for HP moving forward, there would continue to be focus on key business strategies as the company continues to work on a measurable IT portfolio scorecard. These included things like on-time delivery, annualised benefits (tracked in terms of bottom-line), on-target project phases and other key business measurement indicators.