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Let’s talk about digital transformation
at Dell Technologies. How would you
describe your approach?
Within Dell Digital, we call our approach to
digital transformation “The Dell Digital Way,”
and it covers people, process, and technology.
The Dell Digital Way leverages our DevOps
capabilities and modern infrastructure, but,
more importantly, it’s a cultural shift in how
we collaborate with our business partners in a
more direct and streamlined manner in order
to turn ideas into validated solutions.
We form balanced teams, which include our
business partners, that break down big efforts
into smaller value-added elements so that we
can start to use them and validate that we’re
on the right path early. This is key for digital
transformation because the real improvements
come from that collaboration between
business process owners and the technical
teams, talking about problems and solutions
together with very rapid feedback.
What impact does culture have on
digital transformation?
Thinking that digital transformation is
just about technology is an easy trap to
fall into. The technology is necessary, but
not sufficient. Taking advantage of that
technology in new ways requires a cultural
shift. One of Dell Technologies’ greatest
strengths is our ability to be flexible and
lean into change. Never has that been more
apparent than during the uncertainty of
2020. We moved 90 percent of our workforce
remote in less than one week during March of
this year. That shift was certainly about the
technology, but the cultural aspect has been
happening for nearly a decade, with flexible
work programs in use by nearly 30 percent of
our employees even prior to the pandemic.
Driving change in IT and business processes
means creating new ways of working, and
sometimes people are resistant to change—
that’s just human nature. But when you
find the people within the IT organization
and the business who are willing to drive
transformation, and you put those teams
together—the strong technologist and the
strong business partner—it’s incredibly
powerful. That’s where you see multiple
wins of driving out cost, creating better
experiences, and improving employee
satisfaction.
How is that process different from the
way IT operated before transformation?
The process we follow today is dramatically
different from the way we were working just
a few years ago. A very traditional way of
working looks like this: Someone has an idea,
develops a business case, maps the process,
writes sometimes hundreds of pages of
documentation, and gets all of that approved.
And then they engage with IT and say, “This
is what we want,” and essentially check back
in a couple years. I’m joking—it’s not really
a couple years, but it can feel like that. That
waterfall process where there are so many
handoffs is like the telephone game—there’s
often data that’s lost, and really that’s context
that’s lost.
Today, we put together a balanced team,
which includes designers, product owners,
and our engineering team, and they all hear
the voice of the user directly. A business
partner may come to us and say, “I think we
can really improve this process.” We’ll do a
quick prototyping session, look at options and
decide what’s worth exploring, and then put
together a team that works side by side to do
the design and discovery.