We are poised to take digital transformation to the next level, and I’m honored to be Dell’s new Chief Digital Officer to further hone and strengthen our engagement with business partners, cultivate a strong engineering and operational discipline and culture, and lead with simplicity and accountability. The role combines the traditional roles and responsibilities of a CIO along with the emerging role of change agent for digital transformation. It reminds me and my whole organization that we are a key enabler for digital transformation and much more than “keeping the lights on.”
The Path to Digital
For companies that didn’t grow up completely digital, redefining and automating processes to improve operations often aren’t enough. We must also create compelling and efficient experiences for our customers and team members. This often requires us to transform our traditional processes into digital processes, where there are no delays due to manual intervention, batch processes or legacy infrastructure.
The destination is clear, but the path to get there isn’t easy. Over the past couple of years, our Dell Digital team, which is the evolution of our IT organization, has been on a path to modernize our own processes and technology, while investing in our team with new skills and ways of working to address this challenge.
We call the combination the Dell Digital Way, and the goal is to both digitally transform our IT processes and to enable our business partners to do the same. We’re working in balanced teams, with developers side by side with our business partners, and leveraging our DevOps and private cloud technology and practices. A modern way of working is what Dell Technologies’ products and solutions enable for our customers and what we want to experience in our own work here at Dell.
The Next Phase of Our Digital Journey
We are headed in the right direction with our IT transformation, and the next phase of this journey will be moving forward with our product-oriented approach that will drive more direct accountability for how our solutions are designed and operate. We’re moving Design and DevOps to the forefront of IT, like a software organization. With a better understanding of our customers’ and partners’ needs, we can more quickly adapt and introduce new capabilities to improve the overall experience. All of this relies on our continued work to modernize our applications and infrastructure by migrating to our private/hybrid cloud.
A unique aspect of our new operating model is that it features four critical cross-functional journeys aligned to the experiences that people have with us. These are the Customer journey, Team Member journey, Product Group Enablement journey, and Product journey, which is the experience for our own organization to design, develop and deploy solutions. Members of my leadership team will assume responsibility for these journeys to drive focus, accountability and progress across the functional operations.
As we drive our strategy from the perspective of the customer experience and operational excellence, I’m confident we have the right people, processes and technology to level up our digital transformation and improve the way we work.
