Streamlining HP 2 Oct 2007

Fast Company has a great article on Sam Lucente, HP's first-ever Vice President of Design, and his efforts to streamline the company:

"Before starting, Lucente printed out images of thousands of HP's products 'to get a visual sense of what I was committing to and how we might start to organize it,' and papered his entire studio, from floor to ceiling. There wasn't enough space to display them all. HP was then using 98 outside design firms, in addition to its in-house designers. No wonder that when Lucente did an audit of HP hardware and software, the results revealed a stunning range of redundancies. The jumble of logos...was only the beginning. Dozens of navigation controls popped up. So did 38 different help buttons in a single family of enterprise applications. Then there was the hard copy. HP had stockpiled more than 80 million different user manuals, brochures, marketing materials, and the like. 'I didn't believe it until I walked into a warehouse in East Bay and saw all this stuff stacked on pallets,' Lucente says. 'That's when we realized we could use design to simplify our entire operation and help the company deliver on its business model.'"