Speeches

© Copyright 2001 Hewlett-Packard Development Company, L.P
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"Life lived in motion" - it's a concept we're all familiar with, no matter if we're in Hannover or Hong Kong, Lima or Los Angeles.

We're constantly on the move, so much more than our ancestors, or even our predecessors of just 20 years ago. We live far from our families; we work during our commute to work, in our cars or on the train. We pick up our children from school and escort them to countless activities. We can jump on a plane and cross the ocean in half a day. We're always on our way to somewhere else.

But is that experience fulfilling? As consumers, is living life on the go as convenient or easy as it could be? As technologists and inventors, are we inventing solutions and technology that work for people, rather than solutions and technology that require a lot of work?

Within the past decade, much of the foundation has been laid to support a mobile lifestyle.

I could quote statistics all evening to prove that the desire for mobile technology is growing even stronger. But who needs statistics? All you have to do is look around this conference and see the staggering number of cool, tiny phones, and other mobile devices tucked in people's pockets, and you quickly understand that our appetite for mobile technology is here to stay.

However, let's go back to the question of a valuable experience. Because besides being consumers of this technology, the vast majority of people here at CeBIT are also inventors: You invent solutions, you invent technology, some of you invent businesses - even whole new industries. And as inventors, you understand that technology for technology's sake isn't the definition of great invention.

How many of us are taking the time to think about the real needs of the mobile culture that's beginning to emerge? How many of us are stepping back to think about the whole experience of "life lived in motion?"

In order to move beyond independent, piece-part thinking - beyond "wireless" and "gadgets" - in order to deliver a truly valuable experience for "life lived in motion" we need to stop thinking about the world of mobility one element at a time and shift our thinking to consider the entire ecosystem around mobility, starting first and foremost by putting the user's needs first. We need to really dig in and understand what mobile culture is all about.

Now, as many of you know, Hewlett-Packard was founded by two inventors, and to this day invention is what drives us - certainly in HP Labs, but even more generally in the way we go about our business in all sorts of ways, every day.

We like to jump into emerging markets and invent fundamental technologies and new gadgets as much as any other company. But, we have some unique advantages: We're a global company, we're a consumer technology company and we're an enterprise computing company.

So, when we started seeing the mobile revolution begin to take share, we studied the nuances and the drivers behind these trends, to figure out what's truly important to people while they're on the move.

We've sent teams to do street-level research in Japan and Finland and Singapore, so we could get to the heart of people's aspirations for living life in motion. We've observed behaviors, we've asked people to tell us about their dreams, their desires.

We met Keiko, a housewife in Japan, who uses mobile technology to regain freedom, because with her mobile phone and messaging services she can be anywhere and still fulfill her responsibilities as a mom.

And Ari, a doctor in Helsinki, who chooses to be available 24 x 7, but balances work and life by using mobile messaging to receive everything from information about his patients' EKGs to his son's morning greetings from Copenhagen.

And Nishi, Ohtake and Sumito, teenagers, perhaps more like your own kids, who use mobile phones to expand their network of friends by playing online games and exchanging messages.

And we learned some very interesting things from them and others. We learned that communication is more fluid, more intimate, more spontaneous, in mobile cultures. We've learned about how the concept of time gets reinvented. Mobile cultures live more in the moment, more spontaneously, more impulsively.

And we've learned about how the concept of community truly changes, how people are able to now manage social networks, with others near and distant, in new ways.

Besides this street-level work, we enlisted the help and brainpower of our mobile e-services bazaars all over the world. If you're not familiar with them, the bazaars, which are maintained and sponsored by HP, combine an online community with a number of regional centers of innovation where XSPs, mobile operators and enterprises collaborate to fuel the rapid development of mobile e-services. They serve as living labs, a physical, as well as virtual, place to examine the insights, learns, opportunities and challenges companies face in bringing mobile solutions to life.

We've learned that no matter where you are in the world, mobile e-services must be more convenient than their real-world equivalents if they are going to be truly useful. Mobile services have to become second nature; they must naturally weave themselves into the fabric of our daily lives.

Meanwhile, the mobile-appliance market changes daily. We're in an evolutionary period where genetic hybrids and genetic anomalies are producing whole new species in appliances. In this experimentation phase, companies are trying to get form versus function exactly right. They're defining the set of features people will need and use. And they're having trouble finding the right formula.

In our research we found huge discrepancies between consumer desires and technical realities in information appliances. Consumers want them to be very small, fashionable, customizable and yet also highly functional. They must be easy to use, and yet they must also be crammed with features. They must be ultra-powerful, and yet they must have a long battery life.

One of the biggest opportunities that we see for mobile information appliances involves capitalizing on the "blur." Think of the "blur" as the rapid blending of our personal and professional lives. Mobile technology is having a profound shift on how we live and work. Yes, mobile technology allows us to work more efficiently and flexibly, but it's also forcing us to deal with the balance and the burden of feeling constantly available, constantly connected.

Finally, today's infrastructure for mobile communications and transactions is in its infancy. There are three huge infrastructure challenges that have yet to be tackled:

• Complexity: It is far more complicated to deliver voice and data on demand than, say, it is to deliver electricity - from the number of players involved to the often conflicting roles they must play, to the sheer complexity of the technology. And the task of bulletproofing the network is a challenging one, but one that we at HP take very seriously and one that we're uniquely suited to address.

• Local mobility versus worldwide mobility: There are pockets of high-functionality mobile networks in the world, but underpinnings and standards employed around the world differ greatly.

• Demand: Today's infrastructure needs to evolve to handle the increasing demands of users who desire fast multimedia, always-on connections and instant communications. Some of the pioneers behind 3G and even 4G are aware of this, but every day you pick up a newspaper and read about the tremendous cost and difficulty of making this work. It's a challenge all of us are going to have to address. And it requires that we all understand how enabling infrastructure technologies will work together to form the architectural framework for mobile connectivity.

So, let's say we learn from our research and resolve the technical issues behind making the appliances and services and infrastructure, work the way consumers are demanding they do. What do we do then, to make tomorrow's mobile experience truly useful, truly valuable, for people on the move? What have we learned about what people want to be able to do when they're living their lives in motion?

We've learned that services are what make mobile computing useful for people. It turns out that a useful mobile solution isn't simply about putting the Internet in your pocket. Instead it's about using the Internet to deliver the services you need based on where you are, whatever context you're in: your car, your office, in someone else's office, in a hotel, running through the airport.

It's not just about delivering mobile e-services to your mobile appliance, it's also about letting that appliance take full advantage of the resources in the world around it. What I mean is that a new model of computing is rapidly emerging. At HP, we refer to it as "service-centric" computing.

It's about the physical and digital world being intertwined to deliver what you need based on where you are and what you want. Wired and wireless appliances, infrastructure, and e-services will be brought together, connected, and harnessed spontaneously to perform tasks and then disconnected when the task is compete and they no longer need each other. We're talking about computing architectures that will couple together everything from technology resources, like processor cycles, storage, IO, memory, and devices, to application-level business and consumer services, like messaging, travel, financial services.

Every device in any environment can become a resource or a service to anything else in the environment by connecting to an open standards-based, always-on Internet infrastructure to access e-services. Imagine that the whole model of computing focuses on how and what and where and when services get delivered.

At HP we've created the technology to enable these types of interactions, and we're working with partners to bring them to life now, not some time in the future. At the heart of all this capability is our suite of CoolTown technologies. CoolTown is a world where everyone and everything is connected to the Web through wired or wireless links. It's a world where humans are mobile, appliances are connected, services are everywhere and everything has a Web page. It's service-centric computing in action. If you want to see it, we have some demos out on the show floor for you.

So, in this service-centric world that I'm describing, everything and anything with a microchip can become a platform for the delivery of e-services. At HP, we're taking device connectivity to the Net, building on the power of Internet and Web protocols that are already ubiquitous. And every person, every place and everything can have a Web presence.

The picture I'm painting is not a world of smart everything, but rather a world of useful things: appliances and environments that are "smart enough" to perform tasks of all types. And thanks to the open architecture of the Net, these systems, which often know little or nothing about each other in advance, can be "smart enough" to collaborate when they need to, to deliver the experience people want.

Of course, a service-centric world also hinges on a highly reliable, always-on infrastructure to support delivery of the services people want.

When people can access the services they need, whenever they want, without messing with a lot of technology, when they can enter an environment and it understands who they are and the context they're in so it can deliver exactly the services they need.

That's the service-centric world we should all be building. It's not about the Net in your pocket; it's about context-specific services proactively delivered to you. It's not about wireless only; but wired and wireless appliances connecting and collaborating to deliver e-services. It doesn't require creating a new network; it's about leveraging the open architecture of the Net to make e-services available in any environment.

It's not about smart everything, but about appliances and things being smart enough to deliver what you need. It's about services working in the background so that technology becomes invisible as the user moves from one environment to another; the mobile device becomes aware of what services are available and delivers them in a format appropriate for the capabilities of that device.

So the next logical question is, how do we make the service-centric world come to life? How do we seize this opportunity to deliver a useful mobile experience and create that world where people on the move get access to the services they need, wherever they are?

We make it happen by changing the way we think about life lived in motion.

It requires a cultural shift. As I said before, really digging in to understand the inherent needs and desires of people and inventing valuable solutions to fulfill them is one of the most important things to help elevate mobile technology and bring about tremendous change. It's also critical that we take into account issues around privacy and security. Ensuring customer trust and confidence is essential if we are to maintain lifelong customer relationships in a world in which it's all too easy for customers to shop around.

It requires a technology shift. I'll say it again: This is about much more than inventing a cool device or a killer app.

It's everything: business and consumer; billing systems and storage; content and applications; devices and infrastructure. True services-based computing requires capabilities and technologies beyond today's computing model - like security approaches that enable truly safe interactions between anonymous devices and systems or the ability for Internet resources and services to advertise and locate one another to complete a task or a transaction or the ability to manage multiple interactions between services simultaneously.

Finally, bringing this world to life requires a business model shift. We're quickly entering a reality in which businesses can reach their customers at any time of day, in any remote corner of the world, where consumers can make micro-payments for only those transactions they engage in, where businesses can participate in the electronic marketplace and dynamically integrate their service with other companies' services to create new value for their customers on the fly.

It's a totally new landscape that we must prepare ourselves for. So this is also going to require a transformation, a reinvention of organizations of all kinds: large, small and, yes, governments, too. You know how hard it is to reinvent a system, to reinvent yourself.

As HP's chief executive officer, it's the question I get asked most by customers: How are you reinventing HP? What are you doing to lead the Information Revolution to fulfill the promise of our mobile digital future?

Companies today are no longer hierarchical, mechanistic institutions. Rather, they behave like natural organisms, made up of empowered people inside and responding to empowered customers outside. They operate in markets that are similar to ecosystems.

If mechanics was the science of the Industrial Age, biology is the science of the Information Age. Companies are like living systems, and for a company to perform at its peak, it must have its system in balance. A company's system is comprised of strategy, structure and processes, performance metrics and rewards, and culture and behavior. And to truly change an organization, you have to have the courage to change the whole system.

Strategy defines what do we do and why do we do it. And, importantly, what we don't do and why we don't do it. Structure and processes is about how we get our work done, how we collaborate inside the business, how we effectively deliver on our strategy. Metrics and rewards, of course, is about measuring our progress.

And lastly, culture and behavior, because interestingly, in times of great change, culture and behavior is what people look to first and foremost to determine whether or not we're making progress. It's less about what you say, but more about how you act. And this brings me to the final step in reinventing organizations for life lived in motion. It brings me to leadership.

Because without reinvented leadership, these other things won't happen. First, let me tell you what leadership isn't. It's not about hierarchy or title or status. It's not about asserting control or about controlling decision making. It's not about finding blame. Leadership is about getting things done and getting rid of everything else that doesn't. It's about encouraging, enabling and empowering every employee, every worker.

It's about reinforcing core values, articulating a vision and then setting people free. Leadership is about trust. It's about giving authority back to where it belongs, to the inventors who understand the technology, to the team members whose personal relationship build the business partnerships and to the salespeople who know the customers.

Leadership is about responsibility. It's about taking action and accepting the consequences, pursuing innovation and accepting its ramifications, about understanding the human costs of reinvention.

Leadership is about living these values, about living with integrity, about working with others to create a world where people's minds and hearts can be inventive and brave, human and strong;

where people can aspire to do useful and significant things; and

where people not only can aspire to change the world but can actually do it.

At HP we are reinventing ourselves as we focus on the role of technology in transforming business, and everyday life. So I leave you with the question posed in the video: What will you invent today for a more valuable experience tomorrow?

How will you help deliver on the promise and quality of "life lived in motion?" Will you support the open standards of the Net so that every solution you invent builds on and connects to all the other solutions out there? Will you develop and embrace new business models that spark widespread adoption of mobile transactions?

Will you forge partnerships that let you pursue broader opportunities for life on the move? Will you target your best ideas to take into account the device and the always-on Internet infrastructure to support it and the services delivered over that infrastructure? Will you lead the people of your own organization to invent radical solutions that change the world?

Thank you.

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