BRISTOL, ENGLAND — The new head of HP Labs told Managing Automation this week that Hewlett-Packard’s pending $13.9 billion acquisition of IT services giant EDS could lead to more service-focused development projects, as the famed lab that gave the world inkjet printers, scientific calculators, and LEDs looks increasingly into how companies can use technology to automate processes.
Prith Banerjee, who left a 25-year academic career to take over as head of the Palo Alto, CA-based labs in August 2007, said he would like to develop “workforce optimization” technology that would help companies intelligently allocate geographically dispersed employees to the right projects.
“Those decisions are currently made manually,” Banerjee said. “We’re cooking up an idea where we could automate that.”
Automating the process would minimize the mistakes that companies often make of assigning individuals to a task when they could better utilize the same person’s expertise on another project.