 From the CUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and welcome to this CUBE Conversation. What we love when we get to dig in with CIOs, talk about what's changing, talk about what's happening in the globe. Happy to welcome to the program, first-time guest, Jen Felt, she is the CIO and also the first Chief Digital Officer for Dell Technologies. Jen, thanks so much for joining us. Yeah, thanks for having me. All right, so as I mentioned, we've had quite a few Dell CIOs over the years. Well, I shouldn't say that many. Dell does have CIOs have a pretty long life cycle. You've been with Dell for a number of years. You now take the CIO role. And for the first time, as I mentioned, it is also the Chief Digital Officer. So maybe let's start with, give us what your charter is and why it is important now that the CIO also has that digital mandate. Well, thank you. It's a role I'm really privileged to have and the combination of the CIO, which is a very traditional role in the sense that we have responsibility for all of our IT infrastructure and applications. And the Chief Digital Officer is really about driving that digital transformation, automating processes and working directly with the various business functions on the process, the KPIs and the automation of them. So it's a role that I fully embrace. I have been at the company for quite a while. So that gives me a good background in the processes that we operate and hopefully bring that to the organization about how we can use automation and technology to make some dramatic improvements in the products that we offer, but mostly the customer experience and employee experience that we create. Yeah, when I've talked to CIOs over the last couple of months, of course the global pandemic has been something front and center. And for those CIOs that had gone through some kind of digital transformation, they were glad that they had gone through it because of that agility, that leveraging data is absolutely needed. You had gone through at Dell a rather substantial transformation of coming together of Dell and EMC. So I guess how has the IT processes and previous transformations had the company ready to deal with the current situation everybody working from home and the like? Well, it's a great question. I mean, you started off with having interviewed my predecessors and I would say for most leaders of IT organizations, I always leave a legacy. So luckily for me, there were some good things left from those who had led this organization before, which would be investments in our network and VPN capabilities that, I'm quite thankful to Baskire at VMware who really led the charge for us in making the case that those were important investments to make as a company, getting out ahead of what might have been, there wasn't an urgent need. It was the right thing to do. And those things have been incredibly valuable to us as we've now moved everyone to working from home. So our digital transformation really starts from the ground up, whether we're talking about the infrastructure, the network, the devices that we have in employees' hands, the move to modernizing our applications so that they actually work effectively while people are at home, while people may have different levels of bandwidth available to them. Those investments really pay off in the fact that we have over 90% of our employee base working from home being productive. And I think that's really a testimony to my predecessors and the work that our team's been doing to really operate a modern infrastructure, modern applications, modern IT organization. So Dell is a global workforce. I'm wondering if you could just bring us inside a little bit as to what is different about everyone working remotely versus just working across all of the locations that Dell has. And I'm curious, are there things that you look at now and say that these are long-term trends, what stays the same and what adjustments, if any, need to be made as to how you think about that underlying IT enablement for the workforce? It's a great question. I think, you know, personally, some of the things that I was surprised about when we think about, okay, we have to enable everyone to work from home. Well, we ran into, sometimes there are legal constraints in terms of what people are able to do from home with respect to taking a call agents being able to respond from their homes in India. That was just something that we were allowed to do, not just Dell, but, you know, all organizations were allowed to do during this pandemic. So being aware of what was regulatory, we had, as we went to deploy devices, let's say laptops to people who had been desktop-based, we had to become much more aware of trade compliance, of moving equipment across borders and making sure that we had the appropriate information for doing that. So I mentioned those because those are typically not the things that we're thinking about as an IT organization. We know that people are gonna come into the office, they will get set up as employees or contractors and we'll see them periodically, right? We'll see them in the office on a fairly regular basis, if not every day. Even our remote workforce shows up to the office every once in a while, right? And now we've said, okay, we'll deal with all of the restrictions that we face into and luckily we have a really robust supply chain that helped us navigate through some of the issues with respect to equipment. But that was probably one of the bigger surprises and as we look ahead, really being thoughtful about how people work from the environment that they're in and what I mean by that is initially we set up a connected workplace initiative over a decade ago and we had some requirements for people. They would have a nice quiet place to work, it would be dedicated, they would have appropriate childcare so they could focus on their work, they were creating a work environment in their home much like we have in our offices. That doesn't hold true today, right? So people are working from their home with whatever bandwidth they have available, whatever space they have available, their children are home, everyone came home, oftentimes their parents are home. So what we're finding is that what's required from the IT professional is to have empathy for the situation that people are in and from a technical perspective, providing the best solutions that we can so they can be highly productive. From a cultural perspective, you didn't ask about that, but I'll throw it in there is also just making sure that people know what's responsible, what they're responsible to do so that they can have more flexibility in the times that they choose to work. So they really have flexible hours while they're working from home so they can accommodate everything else that might be going on. So, and I don't think that is gonna change. I think those things are here to stay which is respecting what individuals have going on in their lives, making sure that it's clear what expectations are and giving them the technology to be highly productive. Excellent. Wonder if we could step back to the discussion we started about your role as the chief digital officer. Bring us in, what's the outcome that we're looking for here? I saw an interview that quoted you and it said that in many ways the IT department is becoming like a software company. What does that mean for a company like Dell? In some businesses, it's like, oh, we're gonna create a new business off on here, banks change what they're doing. We understand what Dell is. Dell is an infrastructure company obviously has software but IT's job is enabling Dell technologies. So help us understand a little bit what that digital role is inside Dell. Yeah, thank you for the question. So when we think about, let's just say a traditional IT organization, people can get into the mindset that people are gonna make and then IT is their captive organization that will execute that request. And maybe third party software, partners, et cetera to execute the ask. In a software company, they have a kind of a different approach which is how do you understand what users are really trying to accomplish? How do you have empathy again for the role that they have and the outcome they're trying to achieve? And how do you bring really a more elegant solution to bear as a collective team? So the things that we're doing around that are forming into what we call a balanced team. So we have our business users as well as our technical teams, our developers and designers sitting side-by-side, not actually sitting side-by-side in today's world. We're actually in a virtual team and a virtual team, but it's a team that says together we have an outcome that we're trying to achieve and we may iterate on a regular basis throughout the day to see how the users react, the technology that we have available and how we come up with the best solution. So one aspect of working like a software company is actually working side-by-side to innovate. The other is having all the operational rigor around our DevOps pipelines, automating our own processes, making the most of your developer's time so that we can spend that time really innovating, coming up with great, highly scalable solutions. So when I say more like a software company, those are the things that I'm talking about is really engaging so that we can come up with disruptive solutions or much more elegant solutions that address user needs. And behind us, we have really streamlined operations within our IT organization so that we spend our time doing great work versus assigning tasks to each other. Excellent, I'm curious, what's the role of data in that? Obviously Dell Technologies has a strong footprint in data and when we talk to Dell customers, being able to not just store data but extract the value and insights out of that data is hugely important. So where does that intersection of data and digital in your organization? I mean, data is digital. When we talk about creating experience, it's often it's either creation of data, the insights that come from data, applying advanced, we call them advanced, it could be machine learning, different aspects of AI, actually applying intelligence to the data that we have so that we can make for more frictionless experiences for our employees or for our customers, ideally for both, everyone has a frictionless experience. So data is incredibly important to driving digital transformation, creating great experiences, driving operational efficiency. And luckily for us, I think we have a really strong culture of being data-driven. People all across the organization are very comfortable looking at data, digging into it, asking what it means and understanding whether or not we're making good decisions with the insights or poor decisions. So I think that makes it kind of nice that there's not a lot of education about data that has to go on, but it is on the critical path of having good data to create insights in all of our transformations. Excellent, and one of the things we've often highlighted over the years with some of your predecessors is IT often gets access early and is one of the feedback to the product teams as to what works well and what does it. Anything recently that you could share about latest innovations coming out of Dell that your team is leveraging? Yeah, I love this role actually because we do get to work with the product groups about the solutions that we're offering to customers. We might not be a very typical customer just given our size, but we do get to offer our feedback and do a lot of collaborative work. Right now we're working with our PG teams on this new work from home environment as we look at the type of capacity that people need on their laptops to be able to support teams and Zoom and do that in a very effective way. I think those are the kinds of things that you'll see from our product group. They can use our employee base as really a test bed to look at what are some of the dynamics that we're seeing and then that goes directly into the new products that come out. So it's a nice opportunity. Certainly we get to use things that are early. They might not be ready for prime time yet, but we get to offer our feedback that benefits us and I think it also benefits our customers that they get to leverage our tests and trials in their own operations. All right, so you talked about building on the legacy of the previous CIOs at Dell. As you look forward to whatever this new normal is going to be as COVID-19 rolls out and we move beyond it some, I'd like to get your viewpoint on the role of the CIO going forward. Well, I think more than ever all of our companies are dependent on their IT organization to ensure that they can continue operations while depending on their employee base being at home. So that's probably the context you might say didn't need to be stated, but employees depend on us to be productive and be able to do their jobs, which I think is really key as individuals. We are looking to that IT organization to say set me up so that I can be a productive participant in the workplace. Now, more specifically, when I think about what we're doing, we're looking at this is a new, it's really kind of a new topology of what our IT environment looks like. The traditional boundaries of what has been the workplace or the office and a set of buildings is now expanded into people's homes. So we're looking at the devices that people have, the laptops or desktops that they may be using at home as well as the software that provides security and access for them. Then through to the network, we have a big investment in our software-defined SD-WAN initiatives that have not only provided us with cost savings, but a lot of flexibility, which I think is the imperative for most IT organizations going forward is we really need that flexibility. And then into the data center, there's no stopping on the migration to using cloud-native technology and building out our hybrid cloud. That gives us, again, much more flexibility as we move forward. So the role of the CIO, I'm certainly biased, but I think it just keeps getting to be more and more important as we enable new ways of working. And it is really important to build flexibility into the go-forward plan. We're not sure what's going to change. We can just be sure that it will, right? Yeah, absolutely, some great points there. We've been saying for years, of course, that IT matters more than ever. So much discussion about how IT worked with the business. What I got from your answer though also is that this current situation really put a highlight on the employees themselves too. So an important thing we've seen, CX and the like, all putting the call centers and the employees and everything, but current situation, of course, having us all reflect on the personal impact that global things and technology have on us. Jen Felch, thank you so much for joining us. Pleasure to chat with you and definitely look forward to watching your digital initiatives for resting in the future. Well, thank you for having me. I really enjoyed it. All right, be sure to check out thecube.net for all the interviews that we have. I'm Stu Miniman. Thank you for watching The Cube.