>> TheCUBE presents Dell Technologies World,
brought to you by Dell.
>> Hey, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage day three.
From the show floor of Dell Technologies World 2022.
We've been here with about seven to 8,000 people.
It's been outstanding since Monday night,
Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante,
and we have two of the ladies from Dell digital with us,
excited to welcome Jaynene Hapanowicz and Betsy Davis,
leaders in Dell digital, which is Dell's IT organization.
Ladies, thanks for joining Dave and me.
>> Thanks for having us.
Great to be here.
>> Janine, let's start with you.
We've heard a lot this week about the need for IT leaders
to think very meaningfully on how to leave a lasting legacy.
How in today's dynamic environment do IT leaders do that?
>> Yeah. Well look, let's start with IT leaders
have a pretty tough job.
You're trying to stabilize an environment.
You're trying to take care of anomalies, security incidents.
Like that's the blocking and tackling,
except you also have to transform your organization
at the same time.
And I think it's really important that you build a strategy
that enables you to do both those things.
So you have to do,
you have to do the blocking and tackling
or you don't get a seat at the table,
but the other things that you have to prioritize
are things like building the business relationships,
putting your customer at the center of what you do,
and building great teams that trust you and you trust them
to develop capabilities that you need for the future.
And your strategy has to support both of those things.
>> We've heard a lot about trust this week,
specifically from Mr. Dell himself,
Betsy you've spoken in the past about the need for IT
and the business to collaborate.
There has to be trust there.
How do you advise folks to accomplish that
true collaboration?
>> Yeah, it's look, trust is so important
and it's funny because last time we were here live
at a Cube session, we were talking about the product model,
which is how we do things in Dell Digital now.
And it's all focused on jointly with the business,
agreeing on human-centered outcomes, starting small,
iterating and together you deliver extraordinary things.
And so over the last few years, building collaboration
through that product model has done tremendous things.
I would say what we're learning more about more recently
is how to extend that.
Especially when you're taking multiple legacy regional tools
and globalizing them,
how do you extend it to policies and processes?
But what we're finding that's interesting is,
the same principles apply, agree on outcomes.
What are you going for?
And then work through it together.
You don't assign it to one side or the other.
It's truly a collaboration exercise.
>> You know, I want to comment.
So Dell has a culture, obviously.
Founder led company,
chairman's name is on the name of the company,
Say:Do ratio, trust, et cetera.
It seems like Dell Digital
has its own little culture going on.
And the reason I say that is,
when Jen felt was up on stage yesterday,
I heard a lot of yelling, screaming, hooping,
people were standing up.
That didn't seem like a typical IT department thing.
You know, that was pretty cool.
So what's the Dell Digital culture like,
is it just an extension?
Is it? What's it like?
>> Yeah, yeah.
Well, I think our leader who we admire very much,
which you saw yesterday has built a great leadership team
and a culture that her leaders trust each other
and that cascades down.
And I think our employees, like all of our folks,
they love working in Dell Digital,
and they love working at Dell digital
because we empower them to do their jobs.
We let them work where they need to work,
and we have, I think, great leadership at every level
to really help people propel the company forward.
We have a single mission
and that mission is to make Dell better.
>> I like the, thank you for that.
I like the way Betsy, you were talking about the,
I called the product mindset.
>> Yep.
>> As opposed to commonly in IT, there's a project mindset.
Ah, I got another project to do.
>> Yeah.
>> Explain the difference.
>> So a project is, some people might say waterfall,
it's a very old school way of doing things
where you say, okay, business give me requirements.
They take six months,
They come up with a list of requirements.
Your IT team goes off and deliver in those requirements.
And two years later you come back together and go, oh,
that's not what we were looking for,
and it's delayed by now.
So product model is really focused on,
hey, let's do short sprints.
Let's agree the outcome, let's attempt to deliver it,
but if we deliver it and then find out, oh,
that's actually not what we were looking for,
then you just iterate and you haven't wasted
two and a half years.
And it's also quite frankly, as a leader,
it's a lot more fun to lead teams in that environment,
because you're constantly getting wins
and they're getting that constant reinforcement
of look at the impact you're making for the business.
Which is a great motivator for all of us at Dell Digital.
>> Quick follow up if I may,
is the enabler there a mindset or is it technology?
Why are you able to do that?
>> It's both.
So part of what makes that possible,
is our modern environment.
Janine has done an incredible job,
really building a modern toolkit for our developers
that makes it easier to collaborate
and move quickly and iterate.
But so much of it is that product model mindset of,
okay, what outcomes are we delivering?
What's the smallest unit of work we can break that into
and let's just go and iterate.
>> And you put the user in the center,
like it's so much easier to develop what a customer needs,
if the customer is at the center
of what you're trying to do, and you iterate from there.
That wasn't the way that it has historically worked.
>> So how do you advise it leaders to become transformational
like this rather than traditional?
Because I imagine those traditional ones,
those businesses may not survive the changing times
that we're living in,
but being transformational that's a challenging mindset,
especially for organizations that are legacy or history,
have been there a while. Can you advise?
>> I mean, you have to fire on all cylinders,
that old people process and technology
is actually still true.
Building a great culture and building a culture of trust,
super important,
but you got to pull your folks along with you on a journey.
You have to have leadership that buys into
doing both transformation and running the business.
You have to, your technology has to support
what you're trying to do.
You can't expect great outcomes
from things that are 20 years old, You're not going to get it.
And your processes, they have to be adjusted to reflect
a cloud operating model.
A lot of companies even struggle with that,
because they're using processes from a decade ago,
and they need to update those policies
to reflect what it is to operate like a cloud, in a cloud.
And how have you guys accelerated this culture
and this mindset during the last couple of years
where things just went crazy overnight?
What was that acceleration like?
'Cause we talked about digital transformation acceleration
with your customers, but you guys have had to transform too.
>> Yeah, and you know, I look at it from a leadership angle.
I think these last couple years have really
given us an opportunity to take what we took
in the product model of human-centered experiences
for our customers and business partner,
and really focus on, hey,
we need to be human centered leaders.
So in some ways that was easier to do with Dell
because we were always very flexible on where people work,
when they work, et cetera.
But I think we've had the opportunity
these last couple years to demonstrate,
hey, it really is about our people first,
we set our people up for success.
We help them take care of their immediate needs,
whether those be personal or work
and everything else works out.
And I think companies that keep that in the forefront
and always approach things from a human center perspective,
whether that's leadership or experiences
in the product model, always come out ahead.
>> How are you faring in the talent war?
My specific question is,
if I were younger and a perspective employee,
how would you recruit me in terms of
how you would nurture my career?
What's my future look like?
What would you tell me?
>> Yeah, I, well, first of all,
let's start with the talent war.
That, I mean, look, it's real.
Our folks are getting recruited like crazy too.
Except I think there is a cultural aspect
that really causes folks to pause.
I also think enabling people to work where they want to work
or where they need to work, it's both,
that has helped us in our recruitment
because the advantage of people do not want to go back
to the office.
Like, I don't know, I'm speaking for like probably myself
and everybody I talk to.
I just don't think people want to go back to the office,
but we're benefiting from that,
because we are actually drawing in talent from companies
that are sending folks back to the office.
And we gave our employees remotely great tools
to be able to work from home.
And that has all been a win for us
in terms of retaining our staff and drawing in new talent.
And I think the other thing and it's a very important point
that you raise, is that the future is working
in modern tool sets.
And one of the things that we did
and Jen spoke about yesterday,
was around developers want to develop
and you've got to give them the tools that they need
to perform their jobs as quickly as possible,
because digital transformation is ultimately
about creating applications that drive business value.
>> I think I'm the only one that probably here
that wants to go back to the office.
If I do one more Zoom call from home, I might go puke.
>> I go to the office, but I'm like 15 minutes away, so.
>> Oh, I'm about 30 seconds away
to really look at my commute.
Let's talk about from that cultural perspective
and the great resignation, all the things that are going on.
You talked about folks getting recruited,
that flexibility of meeting your,
as you said Jaynene meeting the employees where they are
is the same culture that Dell has
about meeting its customers where they are.
And that's really kind of the foundation of
a lot of the announcements that we've heard
over the last few days,
is really that flexibility to be able to deliver
what a great customer experience
and a great employee experience.
I think to me, they're inextricably linked.
>> So I totally agree.
>> So this notion of work remotely, et cetera, great.
Most people, like you said right now are saying
I'm not going back.
And I think some kind of hybrid
is probably going to be the norm.
>> Agree.
>> That's cool. But we have a tendency
to work longer laps times from home.
And so there's that even weekends,
it's like everybody's always on
we should never get emails on Saturday, now I'm like,
I got to look, of course spend an hour or two hour,
whatever it is.
So how do you balance that with folks?
What do you tell people in your organization?
>> Yeah, I mean, we're very focused on our employees
having quality of life, now we're in IT.
Like, let's be real.
We have always worked weekends.
But I think what we're really really
being very thoughtful about,
is that balance for our employees
that we're not creating more stress in their lives.
Like we want them to have a great quality experience.
A lot of that happens with the technology
that we have built under the covers,
because that has allowed our developers
to work less weekends and has allowed our folks
to release independently,
which is kind of in the world of IT,
that's the utopia,
you want to get to let folks work independently.
And that has actually freed up the time for developers
to have to work as if we all work together,
and now they can work independently.
And that has actually helped with quality of life.
So it's, it is still though a combination
of all those things.
It is also having leadership team that values that.
And I think that's what we have.
>> What's cool about this conversation.
We're talking about IT, we haven't even,
we haven't talked tech.
Now are you guys techies?
>> Yeah.
>> You are?
>> Yeah.
>> Okay. So one of the things,
I was in one of these private analyst meetings,
a handful of analysts with (indistinct)
and I was asking her about the cloud migration,
that's a lot of CIOs top priority.
It's obviously, her response essentially was,
yeah, well, we are modernizing our infrastructure,
That's essentially our cloud.
We've got our own cloud.
I wonder if you could like double click
on that a little bit.
'Cause security number one for most IT organizations,
cloud number two, she translated that into,
way I interpret that data is modernization.
I wonder if you could give us your perspective on that.
>> I think the first thing as you map out,
hey, what do we want our modern environment to be?
And you make those technology decisions,
just like with our people,
we need to design optionality in
and make sure that we stay as flexible and nimble as we can.
The same is true for our technology environment.
So that's why you see whether we're talking about
what we offer to our customers
or how we're modernizing our environment.
We want to make sure we've got flexibility and optionality
because what we do all know is
we don't know what the future will bring.
>> How did you guys get into tech?
When did you fall in love with technology?
>> How many years ago?
>> No, like, like what was,
was there something in your life
that like appealed to you or?
>> It's actually really funny story.
My father was a mainframe programmer, so.
>> Okay, So he was doing COBOL.
>> I swear I wanted nothing to do with it.
And then I found myself in those shoes.
>> Yeah. Horrible.
>> Yeah, horrible.
>> It's in your DNA.
>> I think so.
I think so.
>> Okay. So you just, when things started to get more modern.
>> I just thought it was interesting.
Like I'm almost 30 years in.
Like I just thought it was really interesting.
>> That's awesome.
>> And I still think it is.
>> How about you Betsy?
>> I actually started on the business side,
so I worked with IT through my 20 years at Dell.
And when they started shifting to the product model,
I was a business partner and I saw these incredible outcomes
we were delivering to.
And I'm like, oh, look at that cool technology.
We were doing like optical character recognition
to automate it.
It was just, it was super cool.
And you know, I'd known Jen for a long time and she said,
well, why don't you come over to Dell Digital?
And I did, it's been, it been a blast
but I started as a business partner.
>> But you, then you bring that understanding of the business
the outcomes focused to the IT side.
And that's probably why you guys make it sound
like it's so simple to facilitate
the IT business collaboration
that so many businesses struggle with
>> The magic is to make it simple.
>> I agree.
>> Yeah totally.
>> It's not easy.
>> No, it's not easy, but it's possible.
>> Well, and that's what drives adoption.
>> How have in our final minute or so here,
how have the customers,
we know what 15,000 customers globally,
great customers on stage.
We've had some customers on the show this week.
How have they been influential in terms of the modernization
of Dell Digital in especially the last two years,
any interesting stories of customer influence you can share.
>> In terms of our modernization efforts?
>> Yeah.
>> Yeah, I mean, look, we share all the time
with customers on best practices in IT.
And I would really say we have also moved an organization
and solved many of the problems,
the very problems our customers are trying to address
through much of what we've developed within IT.
And I think customers are very interested in learning
from us and helping them
on their own transformation journey.
>> Excellent, ladies thank you so much for joining
Dave and me talking about really what's under
the covers of Dell Digital,
but it's really about people, process and technologies
and collaboration.
>> That's right.
>> Great use case (indistinct).
We appreciate your time.
>> We appreciate it back.
>> Thanks for Dave Vellante.
I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching theCube's coverage
of Dell Technologies World,
live from the show floor in Las Vegas.
Stick around and be right back with our next guest.
(gentle music)