HP adjusts SIG input on 3000 improvements

New process lets CSY propose enhancements, tightens balloting

Customers at the California e3000 meetings last month saw more changes than the new systems announced in the days before the e3000 Solutions Symposium and SIG3000 seminars. HP outlined a new, more stringent set of guidelines to make Special Interest Group (SIG) enhancement requests more meaningful — and therefore more likely to appear on future 3000s.

In a pair of talks at the February meetings, R&D manager Dave Wilde reset expectations about how much technical resource the SIGs will see HP devote to items on the MPE Systems Improvement Ballot.

“For a long time the SIGs felt like they had to tell us what to do,” Wilde said in remarks after the first day of the SIG3000 meetings. “We’ve been trying to more aggressively take charge of the business.”

One result of HP’s Commercial Systems Division (CSY) taking the reins on the product’s future: a two-week enhancement balloting period which ends on March 31, several weeks shorter and with a deadline several months earlier for SIGs’ requests.

“The pendulum has kind of swung to a more internally-driven approach,” Wilde said of the new process which takes requests from customers. “With a complete refresh of the product line, it has consumed a big part of the organization.”

Now that serious overhauls of the product line are beginning to ship, HP will assign SIG-requested enhancements to CSY engineers as they roll off current assignments that made the PCI-based e3000s a reality.

HP is stepping back to decide where it will invest next in the platform, but it’s capping its technical resource below 25 percent to serve all requests from seven SIGs. “We were thinking we’d get back something like the System Improvement Ballot list, but shorter,” Wilde said.

“You could have the idea of making the [enhancement] list meaningful, not just the current gripe of the day,” he added.

HP is making a specific commitment of “something less than 25 percent” of its technical resources to the kinds of improvements requested by SIG members. These customers know the 3000 so well they can suggest things that higher-level MIS managers aren’t aware of, Wilde said.

Specific areas which don’t get a lot of business-driven investment include application development, Internet tools, system management tools and database enhancements. “When I go out and talk to CIOs, they’ll talk about core platforms, storage and things like that,” Wilde said. “They don’t think much about things like a database enhancement.”

The HP lab director said that CSY has overlooked supporting greater than 4Gb on the 3000’s boot disks, or mirroring the system volumeset, some Allbase, IMAGE and COBOL enhancements.

CSY means to swing the pendulum back toward customer requested enhancements, he added, so long as they can be presented quickly.

Snapping to decisions

In the weeks following the meetings, the SIGs moved with renewed speed to winnow their wish lists. By the last week of February, all seven SIGs had posted preliminary ballots online to vote on the items that had survived debate to land on an A-list. Voting on these lists produced even shorter lists. And for the first time, the customer requests will be mixed with suggestions from CSY itself about what it might enhance for the system.

HP cited some ideas that seem reasonable to customers but are considered too impractical by the HP engineers who developed the systems. As one example, CSY engineer Jeff Vance pointed to the CIPER protocol, used to control HP 3000 printers in the era of HP-IB connections. He said he’d discussed the idea of moving CIPER to the newer PCI and SCSI HP 3000s, but creators Larry Byler and Jonathan Sauer said the CIPER is too entwined with HP-IB to make the transition to another interface.

The closer contact with the SIG leaders with such data helped to winnow the lists. For example, the 94 enhancement requests from SIG-IMAGE/SQL as of last fall — only two of which were in process in the last year — became 22 requests after the SIG met in California. Once balloting ends for each SIG’s list, its leaders must choose winners to appear on a consolidated MPE System Improvement Ballot. No more than 25 items will appear on this ballot, according to Interex advocacy director Debbie Lawson-Kirkwood.

“HP will give us some idea on how much effort each one of these items will take,” Lawson-Kirkwood said. This effort information appears on the final ballot on the Interex Web site posted at www.interex.org/advocacy. Voting began the week of March 19 and continues through month’s end, terminating on April 1.

The idea of seven SIGS producing only 25 enhancement requests gives some long-time users pause, as the realization sets in that the days of unlimited input are over. But several members at the SIG3000 meeting said the unwieldy ballots of years past discouraged voting. The final 2000 MPE ballot had 60 items on it, while fewer than 200 ballots were received.

“Those ballots were kind of joke,” said SIG-Consult chair Cortlandt Wilson. “I haven’t voted on most ballots. They way it’s been done isn’t a serious effort.”

Most SIGs were adopting a champion approach to getting enhancements in front of customers. If a request didn’t have an individual named to defend and explain its business case, it didn’t even make the SIGs’ own balloting, which ended March 9.

In another example, new SIG-MPE chairman John Burke made it clear those things CSY has already declined to do won’t be re-submitted. The new SIG enhancement list must address projects for which there is no other solution or work-around.

“Items for which there is a third-party solution, or an acceptable work-around, or which HP has indicated in the past will not be worked on, will almost certainly not be included,” Burke said in a posting to 3000-L newsgroup list members in late February.

The champions should provide a better explanation of why any enhancement should be addressed. “It was difficult for us to draw conclusions on the information we had,” Wilde said of HP’s consideration of prior ballots.

The haste in the process is a way for HP and the SIG leaders to improve the process for next year, Wilde added. “I’d like to take a ready, fire, aim approach to this,” he said. “It’s not that we more quickly want to come to an answer we can live with. We want to involve the SIGs more in the process.”

HP wants to work together with the SIGs to “select the things with the highest leverage and the highest benefit across all of our solution areas,” Wilde said.