Company Updates

Innovation in Analytics and Business Intelligence Earns CIO 100 Recognition

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My favorite stories to write on Direct2Dell are those about the great things our customers are doing with Dell technology. But there are also great stories about things our own team does with our technology; and this one today has earned us recognition as a recipient of the 2015 CIO 100 Awards.

“As digital technology has evolved, the worlds of IT and marketing have become even more complicated and intertwined,” Shelly Kramer, co-CEO of V3 Broadsuite recently noted.

That intertwining can have benefits. Our Dell IT team tackled an important business initiative to provide our sales and marketing teams a 360-degree view of the customer journey that captures and integrates all online and offline touch points across the customer life cycle.

To solve the problem, the teams worked together to build a self-service, discovery big-data and business analytics platform called the Marketing Analytics Workbench (MAW) to enable marketing to be flexible and discover patterns in the data. This created new levels of convenience by allowing marketing to get their hands into the data and perform analytics without committing to final report requirements, which would possibly change immediately after delivery because what is important for the business today may change tomorrow.

“Our mission in Dell IT is to be a customer-centered partner that creates and sustains business value! We are laser focused on meeting customer needs. Our inclusion in this year’s CIO 100 Awards really underlines the fact that Dell IT is paving the way for simple and agile IT that focuses on innovation and fashions new levels of convenience for internal and external customers,” says Dell CIO, Paul J. Walsh.

The implementation of the MAW at Dell has allowed marketing to:

  • Gain critical insights and manage customers based on their value and point in the customer journey
  • Leverage insights to target, customize and personalize interactions throughout the customer’s media and channel experience
  • Use metrics as currencies to measure the incremental impact of each marketing activity, such as time to market and acquisition cost
  • Optimize marketing investments by allocating resources to optimize ROI and long-term customer value
  • Respond to change with agility and faster than the competition

"For 28 years now, the CIO 100 awards have honored the innovative use of technology to deliver genuine business value," said Maryfran Johnson, Editor in Chief of CIO magazine & Events. "Our 2015 winners are an outstanding example of the transformative power of IT to drive everything from revenue growth to competitive advantage."

Coverage of the 2015 CIO 100 Awards will be available online at CIO.com on August 1, 2015 and in the August issue of CIO magazine.

About the Author: Laura Pevehouse

Laura Pevehouse was profiled as one of five “social media mavens” in the March 2009 issue of Austin Woman Magazine and named an AdWeek’s TweetFreak Five to Follow. She has been part of the Dell organization for more than 15 years in various corporate communications, employee communications, public relations, community affairs, marketing, branding, social media and online communication roles. From 2014-2018, Laura was Chief Blogger/Editor-in-Chief for Direct2DellEMC and Direct2Dell, Dell’s official corporate blog that she help launch in 2007. She is now a member of the Dell Technologies Chairman Communications team. Earlier in her Dell career she focused on Global Commercial Channels and US Small and Medium Business public relations as part of the Global Communications team. Prior to that, she was responsible for global strategy in social media and community management, as well as marcom landing pages, as a member of Dell’s Global SMB Marketing, Brand and Creative team. When she was part of Dell’s Global Online group, Laura provided internal consulting that integrated online and social media opportunities with a focus on Corporate Communications and Investor Relations. She managed the home page of Dell.com, one of the top 500 global web sites in Alexa traffic rank, and first brought web feeds and podcasts to the ecommerce site. In her spare time she led Dell into the metaverse with the creation of Dell Island in the virtual world Second Life. Laura has earned the designation of Accredited Business Communicator from the International Association of Business Communicators, and received her Bachelor of Arts in Journalism from Louisiana State University. Before joining Dell Financial Services in 2000, she worked at the Texas Workforce Commission and PepsiCo Food Systems Worldwide.