A side benefit of the single data source is that privacy requirements and security can be more easily implemented to comply with governance directives. Mott says: "Although governance was not a driver for change, all these things that give you control and responsiveness also assist you in security and compliance."

The transformation of HP is aimed at making it competitive in every marketing channel -- direct, web-based and reseller. Mott is also trying to shorten the return-on-investment window and believes that consolidation alone will result in a 50 per cent cut in HP's datacenter energy bills.

Although the aim of the project is to slim down infrastructure and cut costs, Mott believes that attempts at being frugal can create an unhealthy atmosphere if firms adopt short-term measures.

"The lesson we need to learn is that just trying to do incremental belt-tightening is not going to bring about the results most companies want," says Mott.

"It is reactive and there's a better understanding needed of the impact it has on how responsive you can be when the business wants something. It's not that we don't have smart enough people, or that they don't know how to do it, but when you've got to do 30 things instead of three to make a change, it takes a lot longer. There is a lack of simplification in the IT environment and a lot of companies are not as well organized as they could be to do that. The first thing we did back in 2005 was to put all IT together to begin with one strategy, one entity, with a single accountability and responsibility, to try to pull things together."

With the project drawing to a close this October, what does the future hold for Mott? Will he take on another challenge at another company? His immediate response is that the fun is just beginning at HP: "If you think about it, we're going to get on a base that is more easily supportable and we'll be able to turn our attention to really optimizing the business. Even though we have 1,400 applications, those applications don't have all the functionality or features we need to really support our business partners and customers.

"When we started, only 30 per cent of our people were on development and 70 per cent were doing support. We will be in a position to have 80 per cent of our people working on innovation when we finish this. We will only need to do something once and leverage it to take the business to the next level."

Tackling a corporate-wide project takes nerves of steel, but does anything keep Mott awake at night?

"If there's anything I worry about it's 'What did I not think about today that I should have checked on?' This is why I have a very good team and a lot of people I can depend on. All the leadership teams need to step up and be accountable for their part in the project. When you try to take on things as aggressively as we are at HP, you really need to be able to count on everybody to do their part and take responsibility."