You’d think an information technology company that is ranked #9 on the Fortune 500, with over $118 billion in revenue would have a cutting edge internal computer system. Not so, according to this article in today’s Wall Street Journal.
“Problems with an in-house system named Omega have kept about 2,000 of H-P's more than 23,000 salespeople from getting their proper monthly commissions for much of this year, according to current and former H-P employees and recent company emails reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
Omega calculates commissions for many salespeople in H-P's business-technology group, which sells back-office computer equipment. But the system, which H-P inherited in a 2002 acquisition, has struggled to handle H-P's growing mounds of data.
Omega has repeatedly malfunctioned since November, according to company emails which show that some salespeople have waited as long as seven months to get their correct commissions.”
HP hired Randy Mott away from Dell back in 2005, paying him as much as $15 million a year after taking into account bonuses and stock. In 2006 he whined in this article that HP was paying too much for IT, and wanted to cut the number of IT workers from 19,000 to 8,000. He continues to brag about what a great job he’s done.
Prior to Dell, he spent 22 years at Wal-Mart, working his way up from a programmer to CIO in 1994.
The king of high tech sales is Oracle. They consistently blow their numbers out. Why? Because they have the best sales people, and they take care of them. HP’s failure to fully compensate their sales people is inexcusable, and is costly. A poorly motivated sales person is an ineffective one. Perhaps Mr. Mott should focus more on fixing this system and less time cutting IT staff and budget.
Update: I'm not too optomistic that anything will change. It was just announced that HP hired Mott's old boss, Linda Dillman, as SVP of Global Information Technology.
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