NETTING IT OUT

Hewlett-Packard Company (HP) has designed, built, and implemented a system called HP Pro-visioner for managing its product content. That’s a major accomplishment considering the scope and scale of product content in this large, global company that offers hundred of thousands of products through a multitiered marketing and sales distribution channel.

With HP Provisioner, HP has taken an innova-tive yet practical approach to product content management. It’s practical because it lets HP harness its content incrementally, an existing content management system at a time and a group of content consumers at a time, delivering rapid and significant results with little or no breakage. It’s innovative because its design: classifies all of HP’s products within a hierarchy that encapsulates product content, is repre-sented in XML Schema, and is implemented in an XML database.

This report is a case study that describes the motivation, approach, design, development, and implementation of HP Provisioner.

HARNESSING PRODUCT CONTENT AT HP
The Problem: Huge Volumes of Inconsistent and Non-Standard Product Content

So, you think you have a product data and product content management problem? HP really has one. Take a look at the scope and scale of product content at HP as we describe it below and, with HP’s help, show it visually in Illustration 1 (please download this report to see the illustration.)

•    HP develops, manufactures, markets, sells, and supports thousands of products. The products range from printing and imaging hardware and supplies, to PCs, to servers, to software, to high-end consulting services.
•    These products can be quite complex. Think about your PC, its product family, model, processor, memory and port configurations, bundled software, and so on.
•    HP sells its products globally in more than 170 countries, both directly through a field sales force, contact centers, and Web touchpoints, and indirectly through sales channels of more than 200,000 marketing and distribution partners. Such marketing and distribution partners include retailers, resellers, distributors, OEMs, ISVs, and system integrators that support multiple touchpoints, too.
•    HP supports its products both directly and through its partners. HP’s product support touchpoints are direct, call center, and Web.
•    HP has a decentralized organization. Its products are developed, manufactured, and marketed by seven business units. Four regions have responsibility for marketing, sales, and service, worldwide. Each business unit and region has its product data model, product content, and systems for creating and managing that data and content.

2002 Was the Time to Take Action

By the time HP acquired Compaq in 2002, the company realized it had to do something to get better control of its product content. The acquisition of Compaq and its large product line of PCs and servers would significantly increase the number of products that HP would offer. It would add huge volumes of product data and product content—all managed in systems that HP would have to somehow assimilate.

Key product content issues that the new HP faced were:

•    Non-standard and frequently changing product descriptions
•    Inconsistent look and feel of product content
•    Duplication of content and content management resources
•    Overlap and duplication of content roles, re-sponsibilities, and staff
•    Proliferation of content management systems

You Face These Issues, Too!

The last point is very important. Because, while your product content issues, and your issues in managing other kinds of content, may not be of the scale of HP’s, the scope of yours may be quite similar—multiple sources of product data and product content, and multiple sources of general content. Business unit-specific content management systems owing to your corporate history, and legacy and application-specific content management systems owing to the approach of software suppliers, especially those whose software delivers a portion of your customer experience—portals, marketing automation systems, ecommerce systems, and customer support systems—are an issue to organizations of all sizes in all industries.

Recently, we’ve been writing about this issue. We call it “Content Islands.” Content Islands are silos for content similar to the data silos of the 1970s, and the application silos of the 1980s and 1990s. This case study is about HP’s approach to breaking down the walls of those silos to create an enterprise product content system. HP’s approach is one that you might consider to address your content management issues...