THE INTERVIEW
“ Context is so important in developing solutions. A former
boss once said to me, and I’ll never forget it, ‘If you don’t
give context to your development team, they will give you
exactly what you ask for. Nothing more and nothing less,
and it will never be what you want.’”
That process gives the IT team context
and empathy for what the user is trying to
achieve in their daily work. It can be eyeopening.
I’ve had developers say to me that
they had no idea what people were going
through every day because that might never
have been written down in one of those big
documents that someone threw over the wall
to us. Context is so important in developing
solutions. A former boss once said to me, and
I’ll never forget it, “If you don’t give context
to your development team, they will give you
exactly what you ask for. Nothing more and
nothing less, and it will never be what you
want.”
So, now, people work on one team, and
they’re able to engage directly with the people
who will use their product. They design a
process together and put out a solution rather
quickly, getting feedback from real users and
iterating on that design. That’s where we see
some great innovation.
company. It’s wildly contagious to be able to
see the results of your work—not six to nine
months from now, but in the hands of users in
a period of two or three weeks.
How did transformation change IT’s
role within Dell Technologies?
We’re earning our seat at the table. I wouldn’t
expect that many of our business teams
are going to be experts about data latency
or what we can do with different machine
learning algorithms. They’re experts in
business process—manufacturing, finance,
sales, marketing. We need to bring the IT
expertise to the table so that we can come up
with great solutions together. That privilege
is earned by being able to demonstrate small
wins, and those small wins build upon one
another. It wasn’t like we went and said,
“Hey, how about if we have a collaborative
conversation today?” You earn that respect by
demonstrating results over time.
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What would you say the success rate
is using that process?
I’ve not seen one of these projects fail yet,
and it’s because you’re changing—you might
change—what your original hypothesis was,
but you do it so quickly that you can see the
results. And a wonderful side effect is that our
team members have never felt so engaged in
their ability to drive meaningful change for the
How would you say Dell Technologies’
digital transformation compares to that
of your customers?
The work that we’re doing within our IT
organization is very similar to the work that
our customers are doing. Much like our
customers, we are not starting from a clean
slate. We have legacy infrastructure and
applications, and we’re on the same journey to