Services
Too many business decisions are unrepeatable: they’re based on hunches and back-of-envelope analysis. The future of services is all about applying scientific and mathematical rigor to how businesses are run. There is a need for models, tools and algorithms to drive informed, highly effective, repeatable, and consistent decision-making processes.
At HP Labs, we’re developing these decision-making tools. One of our major research goals is supporting strategic decisions that are, by their very nature, idiosyncratic, unpredictable, and relatively infrequent. These decisions rely on a mix of information—structured, unstructured, and judgmental. At the other end of the spectrum are decisions made in areas where terabytes of data exist, but analytical solutions don’t yield consistent insight and value.
Through projects in operations and personalization, we’re bringing new data types and sources into play. We’re transforming the effectiveness of complex business processes to create and sell better, more relevant offerings. And we’re inventing and developing the next generation of analytical technologies and solutions that take advantage of the information explosion---bringing personalized experiences to individuals and unprecedented operational efficiencies to the enterprise.
Services Big Bets
Analytics for Operations
We foresee the emergence of the “analytic enterprise”: an enterprise in which clean, real-time data automatically feeds models of key business implications, and in which the decision processes are seamlessly and completely optimized based on predictions and tradeoffs. HP Labs is enabling a radical transformation from backward-looking, information-based enterprises to forward-looking, continuously optimized enterprises. We are creating an integrated system for data-driven advanced analytics services that addresses HP’s key strategic and operational challenges while providing the foundation for new offerings in Business Analytics.
Analytics for Personalization
Personalization enables us to have interesting, novel and convenient experiences in an increasingly connected world, but early technologies in this domain have markedly focused on “sell to” personalization without prioritizing the end-user experience or sufficiently addressing issues of transparency and control. HP Labs is building a secure, transparent, and user-controllable analytics platform, pulling together data from a wide variety of sources to build the most comprehensive and trusted consumer/behavioral personalization technology in the industry. Our technology enables unique experiences and capabilities for consumers, while allowing them to fully control the degree of personalization of those experiences and the information underlying them.
Service Futures
Our work in Service Futures will focus on three interrelated components: People work via processes to conceive, design, market, sell, transition, and deliver services to customers. Our research will offer people efficiency and improved performance – via significant improvements in the processes and the tools they use. From a technology and analytics perspective, actual service consumption occurs at the “edge” of the IT ecosystem. As technologies improve, more data and work enablement will be distributed to computing devices on the edge, and there is a great opportunity to focus on the policy management, the analytics, and new services that capitalize on the expanding capabilities of the cloud. Finally, services depend on centralized service cores to safely manage data, transactions, and access from the edge. Advancements in infrastructure and data management can therefore be brought together to enable rich application delivery as a platform.