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Sept. 11, 2000

Simplicity Takes Hard Work

The Web seems to be the perfect place for 3Com to hone its new consumer- and small-business-oriented market focus. "There's a very good match between the Web and where we wanted to take the company," says senior VP Connors (second from right, with Bose, Starr, and Murphy)

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As 3Com redefines its markets, it's boosting the percentage of revenue allotted for IT. The "old" 3Com spent about 6% of revenue, or $360 million, on IT. The "new" 3Com has earmarked 11% of revenue this year, or $440 million, for IT.

But it's more than an increase in IT spending that's making a difference at 3Com. Technology--whether for customers of its products or for company employees supported by IT--must be simple to use. While "simple sets you free" is the mantra of 3Com's antitechnobabble consumer ad campaign, "radical simplicity" is the oft-heard battle cry of company executives, who, like their rank-and-file counterparts, work mostly in casual clothes and cubicles at 3Com's corporate campus in Santa Clara, Calif.

Radical simplicity means products and technology that are sophisticated and robust under the hood, but easy to use and maintain--like the plug-and-play network and Internet products 3Com sells over the Web.

Radical simplicity also oozes from the technology and tools 3Com's IT department deploys internally for its own users. "The way to make technology radically simple is to make it real complicated inside," Starr says. "You build a lot of intelligence into it."

High on the list of radically simple technologies introduced internally during the last year are data warehouses, modeling tools, and an executive information system, all of which help 3Com managers analyze data and what-if business scenarios for faster and better decision-making. Ultimately, those tools make their way down to all user levels within the company.

Radical simplicity is a driving force behind 3Com's enterprise data warehouse, known as Wisdom, which was implemented last year. Under the hood, Wisdom is complex, running on Sun Microsystems ES10000 servers and employing an Oracle database, Computer Associates' Platinum Repository metadata manager, Informatica's Powercenter enterprise data integration tool, and Hyperion's Essbase online analytical processing engine.

But using Wisdom is relatively simple for the 1,000 3Com financial, sales, and manufacturing knowledge workers who need access to company data. Through a Web or client interface, the knowledge workers use modeling tools based on CA's Erwin/ERX data-design software to analyze corporate facts and figures. Reports can be distributed through the Web, E-mail, or other devices. Wisdom, for instance, can be programmed to alert managers if a reseller's inventory of 3Com products is moving too slowly during a marketing promotion, giving 3Com advance warning of product returns. "The system can be set so that a red flag goes up telling me a reseller isn't meeting forecasts a few weeks into a quarter," says Bose, who managed the Wisdom project. "That'll tell me that's something I need to start managing better."

3Com executives say simplifying processes can be achieved by making most applications accessible through a Web browser. Donna Murphy, VP of Web enablement, is charged with the task of identifying opportunities to exploit the Web to improve efficiencies and reduce costs, as well as making sure the company's 50-plus Web projects are complementary. "Web enablement is our fiscal 2001 Web initiative," Murphy says, explaining that 3Com's goal is to drive the Web "cross-corporate" into all business products and processes. The mandate differs from 3Com's previous Web initiatives because "it really looks at every organization in the company and how it works--the products, the business units."

Murphy's Web-enablement team of 31 people meets weekly and represents all 3Com business units. Meetings are collaborative forums to identify opportunities and leverage the experience among business units that don't typically work together.

The group, for instance, discovered that 3Com had three separate initiatives to collect product-registration information from customers over the Web. The initiatives had slightly different purposes--customer registration for warranties, service contracts, and newsletters--but were fundamentally the same. 3Com combined the initiatives by modifying its online registration module to capture all the information needed by all parties. "The result was a basic registration module that could be used in multiple touchpoints and a customer database that enables a richer dialogue with our customer base," Murphy says.