Enabling Business Transformation

I thought it would be informative to highlight some of our learnings as they’ve helped us to deliver better results and value to our customers.

•    Understand where the business is going.

This seems pretty basic, but is actually hard to do in practice as a company evolves. We have learned to more effectively leverage investments and resources to clearly understand  the planned business model changes and fully vet what the transaction and business process impacts are. For instance, in selling solutions, ensuring we work with the sales  organization and solution development teams to try to understand how the go-to-market motion changes, what data elements should be captured, the processes and system  interaction model, and how the back office transactions systems need to utilize the data to provide the information needed to record, fulfill, invoice, collect and service the customer. Over time, we have learned some of our original assumptions regarding the systems, processes and data elements were no longer valid and needed to be modified. To strengthen our over sight and governance, we created the Business Architecture Team (BAT), a group of leaders responsible for the integrated systems and process blueprint to accelerate Dell’s evolution to an end-to-end solutions provider. The BAT has been an integral part of our organization as we realize it’s important to invest the resources and time early on in the planning process to learn as much as we can.

• Avoid customizing the core  financial systems wherever possible.

For years at Dell, we customized our purchased IT applications or defaulted to building our own because of our differentiated business model. While that may work well in a relatively stable industry, it adds enormous complexity, cost and time when you are trying to rapidly transform a company and the systems infrastructure. We have swung 180 degrees on this and now default to no customization and making it work with the standard functionality when ever humanly possible. While you rarely can get away from customization entirely, we  focus on making sure we exhaust all avenues before we go down this path. Limiting customization creates a more efficient upgrade process, provides improved flexibility and reduces vendor support costs. The importance of standardizing our global systems has heightened knowing that we will need flexibility in our system design as the business continues to evolve.

• Force the organization to look at the business processes.

It’s important to have the discipline to really look at the processes, usage model and environment that surrounds the system or application. Otherwise, it can lead to wasted investment dollars and systems that don’t exactly meet your business needs or are designed around the “as is” business process. At Dell, we have strengthened our approach over the years and have a much more holistic methodology to our infrastructure that focuses on business process redesign as well as system functionality. But to do this, you need to ensure a few things, which lead me to my final point.

• Devote the resources and leadership talent.

We have learned over the years that to do this right for big, high impact programs, there needs to be a named high-caliber executive leader whose sole responsibility is to get the program done and done well. Taking key talent out of their normal job and making these programs their full-time job has been a very effective way to ensure that we get the right focus and accountability. The same is also true for resources–devote the right level of resources, which in many cases means moving strong subject matter experts to these programs full  time. This has been one of the most effective ways to drive success. It may put a strain on the organization, but we have learned to resist the “part-time or night job” mentality.