Another transformation movement...
Translation: We just sent 10 shipping containers full of $100 bills to McKinsey and the advice from their legions of 25-year-old recent MBA grads was to be agile like Amazon.
I have no doubt that HP(E) has lots of dead wood left to prune, but I have been seeing this advice replicated over and over again at more traditional companies. Inevitably it boils down to offshoring everything that can be offshored, followed by cutting every single corner possible when it comes to the few people left onshore, then outsourcing everything that isn't a "core competency." I'm sure that even with all the mergers, demergers and splits that have occurred, there have been a lot of people let go and there are more to go. But cutting your way to growth, especially the usual way MBAs do it (starting at the top of the engineering pay spreadsheet) doesn't work long-term.
People forget that HP and the like are hardware companies producing tangible products that customers physically take delivery of. Even if the guts devolve into software-defined whatever, a hardware company isn't going to move as fast as a software-only company. I work for a very traditional company in a traditional industry, and every "old school" company is scared to death of being left behind in the race to the top of the Second Dotcom Bubble. You can't turn a traditional manufacturer into a trendy SV startup run by 100 people crammed around cafeteria tables. But that isn't stopping them from trying. This year, the trend is to badly implement something the consultants sold the company as "DevOps" similar to the way "Agile" was badly implemented a couple years prior.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
