HP’s head of global operations to leave

Hewlett-Packard’s executive vice president of global operations, Gilles Bouchard, will leave the company at the end of October. The news came Tuesday immediately before HP announced that Chairman Patricia Dunn will step down.

Bouchard’s departure comes at a difficult time for HP. Dunn faces questions from organizations including the U.S. Department of Justice, the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation and a congressional committee. The questions relate to the way in which details of phone calls made by board members and journalists were obtained during an internal investigation into boardroom leaks regarding the departure of former HP Chief Executive Officer Carly Fiorina.

On Tuesday, HP announced that company CEO Mark Hurd will succeed Dunn, who will remain chairman through the company’s Jan. 18, 2007, board meeting.

Meanwhile, Hurd announced Bouchard’s decision to leave in an e-mail sent to all employees late Monday, adding that Bouchard will remain in post until Oct. 31.

In June, HP announced plans to axe the global operations organization that Bouchard heads in an effort to simplify its operating model, folding it back into the company’s three main business units: Imaging and Printing Group, Personal Systems Group and Technology Solutions Group.

Bouchard’s work leading that transition has been “outstanding,” with the majority of the work completed in the third quarter, Hurd wrote in his e-mail.

The closure of the global operations group, where Bouchard managed HP’s worldwide supply chain and customer-facing operations activities, is part of a broader reorganization of the company began in July 2005. That process began with the elimination of the central service unit responsible for enterprise sales, the Customer Solutions Group. Staff and activities from that group were also redeployed to the company’s three main business units.

Bouchard joined the company in 1989, working in its printer business. He later took charge of merging HP’s supply chain with that of Compaq when the two companies joined.

Before concentrating on global operations, Bouchard had an additional responsibility as the company’s chief information officer, charged with simplifying HP’s IT infrastructure. In that role, he was responsible for a migration of the company’s ERP (enterprise resource planning) system. Then CEO Fiorina said in August 2004 that problems with that migration had contributed to the company’s failure to meet financial targets in that year’s third fiscal quarter.