 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 Janine Hepanimitz and Betsy Davis, leaders in Dell Digital, which is Dell's IT organization. Ladies, thanks for joining Dave and me. Thanks for having us. You bet. 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. 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 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 in the business to collaborate. There has to be trust there. How do you advise folks to accomplish that true collaboration? Yeah, look, trust is so important. It's funny because the 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 due 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 Feltz was up on stage yesterday, I heard a lot of yelling, screaming, hooping, people were standing up. It didn't seem like a typical IT department thing. 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 that. I call it the product mindset. As opposed to commonly in IT, there's a project mindset. Ah, another project to do. Yeah. Explain the difference. Yeah, so a project is, you know, 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 delivers on those requirements. 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, you know, is a great motivator for all of us and don't think it's wrong. 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. Genine 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. 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. How do 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, right? You have to, your technology has to support what you're trying to do. You can 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? Because we've talked about digital transformation acceleration with your customers, but you guys have had to transform too. Yeah, and I look at it from a leadership angle, I think these last couple of 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 partners 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 of 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 centered 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 prospective 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, well, first of all, let's start with the talent war, right? That, I mean, look, it's real. Our folks are getting recruited like crazy too, right? 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, right? 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 phew. I go to the office, but I'm like 15 minutes away. Oh, I'm about 30 seconds away if you really look at my commute. Let's talk about from that cultural perspective and the great resignation and all the things that are going on. You talked about folks getting recruited. That flexibility of meeting your, as you said, Jenny, 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 and it's 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. Sorry, 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. That's cool. But we have a tendency to work longer elapsed times from home, right? And so there's that, even weekends, and it's like everybody's always on. Just to never get emails on Saturday. Now I'm like, I got to look, you know? Of course, spend an hour, two hours, 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, right? 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, right? 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 because they used to have to all work together and now they can work independently. And that has actually helped with quality of life. So it is still a combination of all those things. It is also having leadership team that values that and I think that's what we have. You know what's cool about this conversation? We're talking about IT, we haven't even, I haven't talked tech. Now are you guys techies? Yeah. You are? Yeah. Okay, so one of the things I was in in one of these private analyst meetings, you know, a handful of analysts with Jen Felch and I was asking her about the cloud migration. That's a lot of CIOs, top priority. It's obviously, you know, a 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, right? Because security number one for most IT organizations, cloud number two, she translated that into the way I interpret that data is modernization. I wonder if you could give us your perspective on that. Yeah, I think the first thing as you map out, hey, what do we want our modern environment to be when 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? Oh, like, what was it? Was there something in your life that appealed to you? It's actually a really funny story. My father was a mainframe programmer. So he was doing cobalt. I swear I wanted nothing to do with it. And then I found myself in those shoes. Yeah, horrible. Yeah, 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 together and I'm like, oh, look at that cool technology. We were doing like optical character recognition and automated. It was just, it was super cool. And I had 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 a blast. But I started as a business partner. But then you bring that understanding of the business and it's kind of 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. 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 especially the last two years? Any interesting stories of customer influence you can share? In terms of our modernization efforts. Yeah, I mean, look, we share all the time with customers on best practices and IT. And I would really say we have also moved in 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. Great use case, Dell on Dell, we appreciate your time. We appreciate it, thanks for Dave Vellante. I'm Lisa Martin, and you're watching The Cube's coverage of Dell Technologies World live from the show floor in Las Vegas. Stick around and be right back with our next guest. Let's finish. Let's see.