Five Ways to Engage With the Hyper-Connected Customer

Technology is ubiquitous and how it has taken over our lives is astounding. Today, it might be a better idea not to check whether someone is connected, but with how many devices they connect to the Internet each day, and for how long.

In 2014, the number of mobile devices connected to the Internet surpassed the world’s entire population.  Also, the average attention span of a consumer has dropped to an average of 8 seconds.  This means it is more important than ever for companies and marketing teams to reach out to this hyper-connected customer in new, innovative ways that match their expectations. Let’s discuss a few ways in which we can positively impact the connection.

User Experience as a Competitive Differentiator

If a customer is always connected, they will expect the same from a company. Unreliable access to a service or a product online is not an option. In this context, “unreliable” also includes overall user experience. Organizations know this – Customer Experience Insight says that 95% of all CEOs indicate user experience is a potential competitive differentiator. But then why do only 37% have a budget dedicated to it?

Whether it is a question of penny-pinching with the marketing budget, or whether it’s uncertainty if user experience efforts should go on the IT budget, it’s certain that user experience optimizations have a positive impact. Better usability makes the connected customer’s life easier, information more easily found and services more frequently used.

Technology innovations embraced by a wide audience have always relied on a selling point that they make consumers’ lives better. The same logic should be true for the technology that businesses use to reach out to customers and for ongoing communication.

Level Up: Gamification

One way companies innovate in this field is with gamification. Essentially, this isn’t very different from coupons and classic customer loyalty programs, but they add a new element to the mix. For an increasing subset of customers, games and interactivity are a given, so it is no surprise that adding this element to user experience will pull in more people in that segment.

While there is no surefire way to guarantee more customer interaction through user experience or gamification, best practices from game design could help out companies. Interactivity is game designers’ core business, after all.

◈ Use your audience’s prior experiences to your advantage: for instance, people already understand that the ‘thumbs up’ icon means liking, supporting or improving something.

◈ Create a sense of ownership: mostly, this is through personalization. It makes people feel they have a stake in how they interact with you.

◈ Dare to be different: standing out with a unique design that many people like and some will dislike is better than to arouse no feelings at all.

◈ Design for the right audiences: while an API section on a website should speak to developers, a notification system for users on the go has to be brief and to the point.

You Don’t Need to Change Much to Change a Lot

The most crucial point is that you don’t need to change much to change a lot. Innovation isn’t (always) rocket science. Game changers often start out small. Uber started from the idea that all it should take is one tap or click to call up a taxi. As a consequence, it eliminated centralized management structures and shortened the channel from customer to driver. Small changes can snowball into big disruptions.

It isn’t all about cutting and trimming, however. Some airline companies fight the low-cost competition by offering an end-to-end travel experience, with personal care, taxi and hotel reservations included in the offer.

Content Is Always King

Inbound marketing, or content marketing, is another way to maximize the connection to your customer by offering SEO-friendly content. No matter how well-honed a contact strategy, product positioning or a company’s use of channels is, content is what draws people in. As Michael Volkmann of iDea Group says: “For Google, content is king. For social media, too, content is king. For consumers, content is king.”

The hyper-connected customer navigates more channels than ever, so content should be optimized for each channel. More and more channels are popping up. Companies are experimenting with content on SnapChat or pay social media influencers to fulfill the role of market developers.

In Summary

Attracting the hyper-connected customer can be done in many ways, but here are the five things from the article that stand out:

1. User experience makes a difference

2. Gamification can be an asset to draw in people

3. Game design offers many valuable lessons for marketing

4. Innovation often starts out small

5. Content is still the undisputed king

We are living in the 4th industrial revolution and our customer’s expectations have changed. Share with us how you have driven innovation in your organizations to better delight customers.

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Customizing IT User Experience: To Enable Workstyles in Our Digital Workplace

Corey is a hyper-mobile, customer-facing sales representative who is not technically inclined. Sean is an office-based, highly technical engineer. And Jessica is a collaborative and non-technical business professional with a flexible workstyle, working in the office, at home or on the road when it makes sense.

They are just some of the different people with different workstyles that today’s IT organizations need to accommodate as they strive to address a huge shift in what users want for tools and services to be productive both in and out of the office in today’s workplace.

After conducting more than two years of persona and workstyle research, Dell IT recently took a groundbreaking first step in tailoring our tools and services to match our distinctive user groups. We unveiled the Sales Jetpack—a combination of devices, tools, services and education resources specifically focused on our customer-facing, mobile sales staff around the globe.

The idea is to give our field sales professionals— represented by our defined persona Corey, mentioned above—an IT kit of sorts that will enable them to be as effective as possible in doing their specific job. The Jetpack bundle starts with a new Dell laptop, which our sales staff gets annually anyway. In this case, the laptop is a cutting-edge, two-in-one, touch screen model that allows sales folks to take notes on the screen as they interact with clients.

Beyond that, the package includes new cloud-enabled, productivity management software that provides email, social networking services, and collaboration capabilities, as well as a headset that will ensure the best conferencing experience while connecting remotely.

For the first time, we are actually presenting a distinctive set of users with what they should use and how they should use it to be the most productive and effective in their job.

The Sales Jetpack is only the beginning of what we envision as many more initiatives to customize our IT services to the needs of the people that use them, however. In fact, we have currently singled out six different personas— representations or composites of a significant group of people within our enterprise—and three basic workstyles to serve as major drivers of our newly defined digital workplace experience.

More than character sketches

The impetus behind our more personalized approach to IT User Experience is more than just an exercise in providing interesting backstories to fictitious composites of our various IT clients.  The fact is that the corporate world is changing and we need to move from the outdated 9-to-5 office of 20 years ago to a more contemporary workplace that fits the needs of today’s many types of employees who want flexibility in where, when and how they work.

We need to create a digital workplace that will meet the expectations of a workforce that expects our technology to keep pace with what they use in their daily lives outside of work.

To do this, we’ve defined our digital workplace effort around three key workstyles: those who work in the office in the more traditional workplace mode, those who work from home via remote capabilities, and those who work on the road using mobile technology.

Effectively, we are striving to allow our team members to work from wherever they feel most productive in a way that balancing their work and life styles.

Dell IT is still in the process of upgrading the capabilities to provide seamless WiFi and contemporary meeting space in the office; seamless access and rich conferencing abilities from home; and increased mobile apps, seamless access and one-click meeting capabilities on the road.

How we got started

Establishing key personas is helping us take IT User Experience to a whole new level by providing a unique framework to help us tailor those upgraded IT tools and services to specific user groups.

Our persona research actually started as a way to meet the needs of team members from acquisition companies as part of the integration process. A few years ago, we had acquired a number of start-up companies at which workers were accustom to more flexible digital workplace capabilities.

Our User Experience team actually went to some of these companies and interviewed team members about their needs, previous experiences and how we could enable them. From that we put together our first persona, Sean Ryan, a contemporary developer. The persona proved to be very useful in guiding our IT strategy, so we put together more personas for different user groups based on different types of user research – interviews, surveys, direct feedback, and observation.

We have found that personas are invaluable design tools. They let IT make informed decisions about how people that we haven’t met will interact with our services. With personas, we can better understand where we have gaps in our portfolio for specific groups of people.

We singled out six personas as key drivers for our current digital workplace effort and we plan to put together similar targeted packages of tools and services for those groups in addition to our newly-launched field sales initiative.  The remaining five are remote support, engineering, business professional, pre-sales and field support.

As we make improvements to our IT services, we are constantly getting feedback from users to make sure our efforts are on track. Every quarter we measure user satisfaction via a survey that goes out to 10,000 of our 140,000 team members and also use other broader feedback surveys to determine where our services need improvement. Our satisfaction scores are broken out by persona and region to target what issues need to be addressed.

All of these tools are helping us stay ahead of fast-changing working patterns, technology and shifting expectations in a workforce where it is increasingly clear that when it comes to IT tools and services, one size doesn’t fit all.

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Adapting IT Security to a Digital World: Going from Gatekeeper to Collaborator

As IT continues to empower a new, digitally-transformed world, infrastructure capability isn’t the only thing that needs to become more agile and flexible. IT security must also evolve to be more adaptable, more proactive and less reactive to let today’s workforce embrace the cloud.

After all, it doesn’t make sense to unleash new, agile IT applications only to weigh them down with traditional security strategies that create delays, restrictions and outright denials.

For example, in some cases with IT as a Service, a user can provision a virtual machine (VM) in five minutes but then must wait three to five days before security allows access to the data he or she wants to work with.

The question is, how is IT security going to change in this new digitally transformed world so that we can fully take advantage of the agility and simplification of cloud-enabled infrastructure.

A key part of the answer lies in a new approach to trust and risk assessment.

Not just saying ‘no’

The longstanding approach of traditional IT security organizations to safeguarding information has been based on building perimeters and firewalls around assets largely controlled on-premises. That worked when data was used within a traditional on-premises data center but is clearly unable to scale for the continually expanding, mobile and collaborative way today’s IT clients use information.

In the face of increasing amounts of off-premises data , traditional security practitioners have taken a position of  “block first”— “I don’t trust you and I am going to block everything you do and then only give you access based on my risk appetite.”  However, that is not a model that aligns with the agile and collaborative goals of IT and business today.  ‘No’ is not a solution and ‘No’ is not an answer.

The good news is that, in the face of a more modern infrastructure and a much more mobile workforce, the security conversation is being turned around. Digital solutions feature new capabilities that allow IT to manage access, determine context of risk and take action based on risk profiles. Such built-in security safeguards make securing data more flexible, and actually reduce the amount of risk by shrinking the threat vectors compared to traditional restrictions.

As a result, security experts are beginning to recognize the merits of trusting IT and the business to deliver secure solutions through protections that are built-in and not bolted-on. They are shifting from permission-based security to an intelligence-based, risk management approach.

For instance, rather than relying on the traditional user and password that provides access to core IT resources, IT environments are being built with access management safeguards that provision who can access specific data based on predetermined requirements. Such built-in protection guardrails lessen the potential threat to the specific environment since the protections remain in place inside or outside the firewall. What’s more, the built-in controls create added user flexibility because when developers want to add a new app in the environment, they won’t have to go back to security and wait multiple days for them to open a firewall to allow it.

Overall, the idea of security being more proactive and less reactive, and designing more measured responses to threats creates a new conversation: It’s not just saying “no, you can’t do that.” It’s saying “okay, what is the risk exposure” and then understanding what the business impact will be from that risk.

Security’s new role becomes more of a governance and oversight entity, setting guardrails around how solutions will operate.

Security transformation in progress

We at Dell IT are in the process of transforming our IT security approach as part of our overall digital transformation, workforce transformation and IT infrastructure modernization programs.

The new cloud infrastructure capabilities we are building span not just our private data centers but also extend across public data centers hosted by public cloud providers. The challenge is to sort out the different security rules and regulations and means of segregating access and infrastructure to define what kind of data lives safely in what structure or zone.

One example of a refined access policy is the creation of a network specifically for contractors that work for Dell. Previously, contractors would get a laptop and access to the company network just like regular company employees. With the new system, contractors sign in to a specific (VDI) image that defines what they can and cannot access. That provides proactive controls built in before they get on the network and start doing things.

In another proactive security measure, we have created a password portal for administrators who often access core information that machine generates a new password for them every 24 hours, rather than our routine requirement that users change their password every 30 days.

As we continue to advance on our digital transformation journey, our IT security strategy will also continue to evolve to improve users’ digital experience and enhance their productivity while providing adaptive and intelligent data protection built on a new level of trust and collaboration.

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Dell EMC Cloud for Microsoft Azure Stack Gets Next Gen Server Boost

It’s been an exciting journey on the path to deliver the Dell EMC Cloud for Microsoft Azure Stack, and, frankly, we believe we have an incredible and differentiated offering for our customers and channel partners globally. Early interest has exceeded expectations, and our solution is about to get even better—and only weeks after we began shipping to customers.

Today, we’re thrilled to unveil Dell EMC Cloud for Microsoft Azure Stack on our new Dell EMC PowerEdge 14th generation (14G) servers powered by Intel Xeon Scalable Processors. Order ability starts this November, and we believe we’ll be the first to offer next generation compute for Azure Stack when we begin shipping globally this December.

This is great news for our customers as the 14th generation of PowerEdge servers are purpose-built for hyper-converged infrastructure. This software stack integrated into PowerEdge servers will pack-in power and security while optimizing performance as a result of rigorous testing and validation. Why is this important for our Dell EMC Cloud for Azure stack?

With this newest generation of PowerEdge servers, Dell EMC Cloud for Microsoft Azure stack will provide customers greater:

◉ Price performance – offering even better price for performance with the industry’s latest compute technology

◉ Capacity – including up to 156 percent more workload density

◉ Scalability – offering organizations investment protection to run more Azure Stack workloads with a platform that is easily expandable for years to come

Take a look at example density improvements with our 14G platform for the Dell EMC Cloud for Microsoft Azure Stack:

With this large increase in overall capacity, the Dell EMC Cloud for Azure Stack’s hyper-converged infrastructure enables customers to successfully support more workloads in less physical space and original configuration size and standardize on a turnkey hybrid cloud platform that offers the flexibility to support expansion capabilities in the future. This is critical for customers who want a consistent experience across Azure—whether it’s Azure public cloud or on-premises Azure Stack—for the long term.

Let’s be clear: “cloud” isn’t a place, it’s an operations model, and IT organizations are expected to deliver a consistent end-user experience wherever data and applications reside. Dell EMC’s Azure Stack platform makes all phases of the life-cycle (acquisition, deployment, operation and maintenance) a repeatable, predictable, turnkey experience—in keeping with the public cloud experience. Interoperability between public and private cloud resources has quickly become not just a “nice to have” but an absolute, top requirement for most organizations’ IT infrastructures.

Dell EMC Cloud for Microsoft Azure Stack delivers unmatched levels of integration, automation and manageability and enables customers to increase IT efficiencies while adopting a Dev/Ops model. We’re the only vendor able to provide an Azure Stack turnkey hybrid cloud platform that offers:

◉ A solution from the industry-leading hyper-converged infrastructure provider with a foundation of Dell EMC PowerEdge servers and Dell EMC Networking, offering flexible capacity and performance options.

◉ Simple, self-service, policy-enforceable encryption-as-a-service, through Dell EMC CloudLink SecureVM, which provides granular control of where and under what circumstances VMs are allowed to boot and access sensitive data.

◉ Dell EMC best-in-class backup and recovery technologies, which allow you to protect your Azure Stack applications with confidence and align service levels to cost objectives.

◉ Reduced complexity and risk since we manage the component lifecycle for the entire hybrid cloud platform.

Furthermore, the adoption of Pivotal Cloud Foundry® on Azure extends to Dell EMC Cloud for Microsoft Azure Stack, continuing to deliver the promise of hybrid models with consistent services, APIs and consumption models for on- and off-premises.

It’s clear that organizations are moving to a hybrid cloud strategy. Chad Sakac, president of Dell EMC’s Converged Platforms & Solutions Division, breaks down exactly why in this Mythbusters video:

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Protecting Critical Infrastructure from Cyber Threats

People were surprised a few months ago when we announced we were introducing an air gap version of the Dell Endpoint Security Suite Enterprise solution. Aren’t air-gapped devices secure in and of themselves? And do organizations even need air gapped systems with the wide range of security solutions available today?

Organizations related to critical infrastructure frequently rely on air-gapped devices to reduce the points of exposure for their most sensitive departments. In fact, in the worlds of manufacturing, energy and exploration, transportation and finance, organizations often rely on air gap devices to perform critical functions securely.

For these companies, it’s never been more important to employ the most rigorous security precautions available. On October 20, the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) released a joint technical alert revealing the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have discovered a “multi-stage intrusion campaign by threat actors targeting low security and small networks to gain access and move laterally to networks of major, high value asset owners within the energy sector.” The alert called out the energy, nuclear, water, aviation, and critical manufacturing industries as targets of interest for these advanced persistent threats.

The fact is, these industries have been under threat for a while. Last year, 68 percent of oil and gas companies suffered security compromises. And as we move into the era of smart grids and IoT connectivity, 88 percent of American utility executives say cybersecurity is a major concern in smart grid deployment, and 77 percent also feel IoT will be a potential threat.

Employing an air gap model can be one of the most effective ways to ensure cyber attackers don’t succeed in creating a ladder of compromise that disrupts our country’s critical infrastructure. But while air gap is highly secure, it isn’t flawless. Air-gapped devices are still vulnerable to physical attacks that leverage compromised USBs, Firewire connections and other external storage devices.

For this reason, many companies that use air-gapped devices deploy anti-virus solutions for additional protection. Ironically, these solutions can actually become a threat vector, as they typically require organizations to connect to the cloud frequently – often on a daily basis – to download updates. This neutralizes the effectiveness of an air gap system and exposes organizations to the risk of downloading zero-day viruses, which often aren’t recognized by signature-based anti-virus solutions. In other words, most air gap solutions won’t stop the advanced persistent threats the U.S. government is issuing warnings about.

Dell’s Approach to Air Gap

The reason we introduced an air gap endpoint security solution is because we came up with a better way to do it. The Dell solution offers advanced threat protection (read: it stops zero-day threats) by detecting anomalies using Cylance’s artificial-intelligence-based mathematical models. Rather than relying on signatures that need to be updated daily, our models only need to be updated a few times a year, greatly limiting the need to take devices out of air-gap mode. And even when a device is connected for updates, it’s safer because our solution leverages file-based encryption to make sure the company’s data is safe whether it’s being used, shared or stored.

Think about what this means for companies whose projects are located in an area with limited Internet access. Where they would previously have to go without anti-virus protection, cross their fingers and hope they didn’t become the victim of a physical attack, they can now deploy an on-premise security solution that doesn’t require connectivity to operate or manage.

In the end, the goal behind our new air gap endpoint security solution is simple: We want to ensure companies who want to use air-gapped devices are able to do so effectively, consistently and without interruption to their workers’ productivity. There’s nothing more disheartening than employing a security strategy only to have it backfire through the introduction of either new threat vectors or inefficiencies in workflow.

If there’s an overarching mission for the Dell, it’s enabling companies to achieve the perfect balance between productivity and security. With the right technology, you don’t have to sacrifice one for the other.

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Business Insights and Data Center Evolution: Dell EMC’s Offerings for Tribes and Casinos

Earlier this year, Dell EMC hosted a webinar with Carahsoft Technology to provide an overview of our technology solutions for North American Tribes and casinos.

Al Ford, a technical sales rep here at Dell EMC, hosted the event and discussed how integrated storage solutions and infrastructure can help Tribes and casinos to evolve their data centers.

For example, Pechanga Resort & Casino worked with us to ensure it was making the best possible use of data and analytics to gain greater insight into its customers, inform its investments, and optimize day-to-day operations.

With data sources including loyalty cards, slot machines, and online and point-of sale transactions, the potential for Pechanga is huge.

“We’re already a data-driven business,” says John Kenefick, VP of IT & CIO for Pechanga. “We knew that the next step was to take advantage of the latest advances in big data. We wanted to eliminate silos and aggregate data from all sources in one place where marketing, financial, and other analysts could use it easily to gain insight and make business decisions.”

The objective, says Lee Torres, Pechanga’s VP of Marketing & CMO, is to be able to apply information in a timely and cost effective way to optimize each guest’s experience in two ways. “One is guest-facing. How, based on the data, should we invest in a customer, to offer an experience that gives them more of what they want? The other is internal. How can we streamline procedures and processes and provide our team members with information to deliver a better guest experience during the visit?”

A common concern for Dell EMC Tribal and casino customers and prospects is around the entry point and cost associated with deploying or updating storage and data center infrastructure. To that end, we’ve focused our range of customized, affordable and effective solutions with the following in mind:

◉ Ease of management – management is built throughout all solutions and products
◉ Improved effectiveness and responsiveness of existing infrastructure
◉ Improved responsiveness for remote offices
◉ High scalability and low-cost entry points
◉ Flexibility to adopt new technologies and avoid vendor lock-in

While the Pechanga team clearly recognized the potential pay-off and urgency of putting big data to work, they were unsure of where or how to start. After meeting with Dell EMC big data analytics consultants and data scientists, Kenefick decided to move forward with Dell EMC’s recommended first step: Develop a company-wide vision.

Dell EMC’s Big Data Vision Workshop service provided Pechanga a quick, low-risk way to explore what’s possible with big data and analytics in its business—and align stakeholders on the best way to move forward.

“It was a cool process because a lot of people from different functional areas of the company were all together in one room with the Dell EMC team and it was amazing how the ideas started to flow,” says Torres. “It wasn’t just ‘What can I do in marketing?’ and ‘What can I do in IT?’, it was ‘What can we do together as a company?’ and that really set the stage for where we are today.”

 A quality infrastructure provider should any provide flexibility to accommodate any workload, environment and experience. For our Tribal and casino customers we aim to provide solutions that are:

◉ Tailored to your workloads and paired to match architectural strengths
◉ Aligned to your IT environment, leveraging existing standards and technology, staffing and expertise, processes and operations
◉ Delivered for your consumption model – driven by your organization’s specific requirements and desired experience. Whether your casino is looking to build or buy, Dell EMC can help fill in the blanks, provide technical maps or provide the entire blue print with validated solutions, engineering systems and hybrid cloud platforms.

“The primary advice I would give to others is: find the right partner,” says Tjeerd Brink, VP of Finance & CFO. “Dell EMC helped us think outside of our box and identify areas where we can really use big data to help us grow our business.”

Torres agrees. “Dell EMC brought big data expertise—and not just about data, but about the structure and the processes we needed to develop. We were able combine their expertise with what we do really well, which is run a casino. It’s been a great partnership.”

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IoT Is as Good as the Infrastructure That Supports It

Think of IoT as a set of ‘things’ that should be stitched together to benefit from data collection to data mining. What is widely understood is that IoT is about data collection, dataflow and data analysis; but it is not common knowledge that the IoT substratum is an end-to-end secured infrastructure solution with sensors at one end and enterprise IT gear at the other end, with a variety of intelligent data aggregators in between.

Software based workloads like machine learning and deep learning that analyze billowing amounts of data, are elementary to the IoT solutions stack, and the efficiency of these workload is built upon the technical capabilities of the enterprise IT infrastructure that shapes the datacenter. Never before in human history has computing power and data storage been so readily accessible – and economically viable.

Dell Technologies as an IT infrastructure provider is poised to create the end-to-end IOT solution stack for customers in this digital economy. We work with system integrators, partners and domain experts like accelerator processors who bring the expertise to design and implement efficient IOT solutions. Dell EMC’s tour de force is the 14th generation of PowerEdge Servers, whose unique capabilities in NVDIMM memory subsystem, NVMe storage devices, remote management through iDRAC and GPU based computing, amplify the impact of the IoT solution.

As you read on, you’ll understand the diagram which depicts the components in an IoT continuum. We have invested heavily in our engineering efforts to enhance NVDIMM capability of PowerEdge servers which boosts application performance, data security, system crash recovery time and to enhance SSD endurance and reliability. If a separate thread on a dedicated core can be assigned for reading and writing intermediate results from applications, the performance can be further improved- and our new server portfolio enables that.

The new generation of Dell EMC servers are highly optimized for NVMe storage that can create overall cost parity by regularly flushing the contents from NVDIMM. IoT workloads also utilize typical database system and transaction logging that can be configured on the NVDIMM to boost performance. The compute architecture of PowerEdge is designed in such a way that the in-memory database systems can utilize these NVDIMM capabilities for performance gains.

We understand that scalability, change management and serviceability are key parameters in IoT deployment and these requirements are efficiently satisfied by the remote management features in our new server portfolio. PowerEdge servers automate mainstream operations in iDRAC is what makes it an integral constituent while designing any IoT solution. The security aspects of the new server portfolio makes it the core ingredient in the assemblage of a secure and connected infrastructure for IoT. These servers are undoubtedly the bedrock of IT infrastructure for IoT solution.

All things considered, Dell Technologies with its highly capable solutions at edge, core and cloud, along with global partners, is uniquely positioned to provide the right technology to design the most secured and most efficient IoT solutions. After all, IoT solutions have to result in operational efficiency, better customer experience, mitigate risks and identify newer business models – thereby unleashing the true potential of our customer’ business.

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Four Results of Tackling IT Transformation

Digitization, or digital transformation, is an essential step for all companies, and it’s a topic I have spoken and written about extensively. However, this process can’t happen without IT transformation.

Digital transformation? IT transformation? I know. The terms are somewhat misleading, and they test the patience of many a manager. At the same time, it isn’t that difficult to differentiate between them. Digitization involves developing new business models and improving the way in which target markets are addressed. IT transformation means transforming the IT organization and building more agile, better-performing IT systems. It is often associated with replacing legacy systems and IT infrastructures which are becoming obsolete.

IT transformation is necessary because, on the one hand, information volumes are skyrocketing. According to Dell EMC IT Transformation Journey 2016, over 44 zettabytes of data will be available by 2020. That’s 44 billion terabytes. No data center will be able to manage those volumes if it isn’t using the very latest technology.

On the other hand, the IoT is playing an increasingly important role: According to our analysis, 30 billion devices will be connected to one another via the Internet within three years. These will include classic servers, PCs, and smartphones, but also machines, sensors, and actuators. Every IT department needs to take this development into account.

There’s also the fact that the departments and virtual teams dealing with digitization are demanding processed data with ever-increasing frequency and speed, and they want data that is more relevant for making decisions. And they are pursuing this data relentlessly, because the success of their projects, and ultimately the competitiveness of the company, depends on it.

But the previous role of the IT department as the easy-going provider of tools and solutions, however optimized they may be, is no longer sufficient for the new, high-tempo needs of the company. The CIO must redefine the company’s IT as ITaaS (IT as a service), which proactively supports the business strategy in a success-oriented way. This includes a better understanding of business practices and processes, as well as more in-depth dialog with the company’s departments. And it also requires a completely new attitude.

Transport operators or taxi companies, for example, have to bid farewell to the “passengers” they have so often held in contempt and suddenly get acquainted with the idea of “customers” when completely new, customer-friendly competitors appear on the market. And IT departments have to take a similar step. That is to say, they must leave their ivory towers and seek out a dialog with their “customers” in the business.

This means researching the needs of the company’s departments and teams, and, of course, supporting them as quickly and competently as possible. This works best when IT staff develop “front office skills” in their interactions with their colleagues in the business. That means speaking their language and taking full responsibility for the IT services they provide. But the question of whether this will be successful or not doesn’t ultimately depend on the organization, but on the team’s attitude.

According to the results of our Dell EMC 2017 IT Transformation Maturity Study, there’s plenty of good news when companies tackle the process of IT transformation. I’d like to quickly list the four most important results here. After the transformation:

◈ A company is twice as likely to exceed its revenue targets.

◈ Companies spend 14 percent less on each business-critical application.

◈ IT departments have access to a 12 percent higher proportion of their budget for innovations.

◈ 47 percent of companies run their IT departments as profit centers rather than cost centers.

In other words, everyone profits in the end. The company profits because it boosts its competitive edge, and the IT department profits because it has a bigger budget for high-value assignments.

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