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Episode Summary
The first series has the theme "Prepare for the intelligent future". Together with Michael Morton VP, Dell Fellow, Dell Technologies Data Strategy and Development, Mike Veldhuis talks about how to transform your company into an intelligent business. Listen through your favorite podcast app (Spotify here) or watch via YouTube.
Want to know even more and ask your own questions? Then register for the (English) online Masterclass, provided by Michael Morton.
Episode Notes
The Platform Website: https://www.nalta.com/theplatform
All Nalta Blogs: https://www.nalta.com/blog
Host, Mike Veldhuis
https://www.nalta.com/mikeveldhuis
Guest, Michael J. Morton
https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaeljmorton/
Transcript
Mike Veldhuis: 0:00
You are listening to the Platform Podcast to learn about our digital world. I am Mike Veldhuis, partner at multidose calm.
Michael Morton: 0:11
I'm Michael Morton, VP of Dell Technologies, data management and intelligence and Dell Technologies fellow.
Mike Veldhuis: 0:17
Well, welcome to the second episode of prepare for the intelligent Future Part of the Platform Podcast Series. And today, we're going to talk about the essentials of your digital Foundation, together with Michael Morton, hi Michael.
Michael Morton: 0:37
Hey, Mike, great to be back for session two couldn't wait.
Mike Veldhuis: 0:40
Yeah. One week. Last week, we talked about really Planet Data, which was kind of exciting. And we had a couple of questions for our audience. Did you answer them yourself?
Michael Morton: 0:59
Of course, every single day, I'm thinking about, what do I want to know, I think my life is based on questions.
Mike Veldhuis: 1:07
Yeah, could you do a recap of last week, please.
Michael Morton: 1:14
Well, I think last week was a great way to set the stage to try to express that everything we do in our personal lives, and business is just this constant generation of data. Always, always, always. And the name of the game to be competitive and generate revenue for your business is to make data driven decisions. Hence, you need to think about what does it mean to transform your business into an intelligent business? So where we left off and sort of talking about, hopefully getting people to maybe realise a little bit more about all the data that is being generated is, okay, great. But now, how do you capitalise on our planet data? And don't be overwhelmed, but just think about the first few simple questions that you would really like to get answered, for your business to be more competitive.
Mike Veldhuis: 2:08
Awesome. And we had quite some discussion about what topics we wanted to address in this podcast series. And basically, Episode Two, we had a lot of discussion about it, because we, at first, we thought we would just focus on the data Foundation, just talk about what kind of data you have, how you can connect it, and how you can drive value from it. But when we started a little bit deeper into the discussion, we actually found out that's probably not the only thing we should think about when becoming the intelligent business. And that's why we renamed the episode, the essentials of your digital foundation. And today, we're going to talk about digital culture, which is extremely important to grab, get a grip on and discovering new value from data. That's actually the two main topics we're going to address today. Starting with the first one, digital culture, what pops to mind, Michael, when we dropped that phrase?
Michael Morton: 3:14
You know, first of all, I'm really glad that this shift happened. Because I find myself I'm a deeply technical person. I'm still very much hands on, I'm always learning new technologies. And that's an aspect of my of my career that I really enjoy. But it is undoubtedly you can throw at a problem technology data all you want. But you will not succeed without the right culture and leadership. And this is so important. And I find myself more and more engaging in these discussions about Okay, now, how should we execute as a business? I mean, who do we look to? What how do we actually accomplish this, you know, from within, you know, an organisation small or large. And we find that a lot of times success is is 100% dictated by being able to do that and culture mindset. unbelievably important. And so, I've really enjoyed having this discussion, to prove of how important it is before you start talking about technology.
Mike Veldhuis: 4:23
Yeah, and I think it's, it's a good decision and delving into the experience. twofold. On the one hand, it's your job as well reading a lot of articles what's what's being written about these topics? on the web, in conferences, what are their online right now, Gartner is putting an enormous effort in generating content about this topic. So we would get a lot of knowledge from that. And on the other hand, it's personal experience what we are experiencing with our customers. they are dealing with these topics what kind of questions they ask us to to build we're really focused on building platforms digital platforms but sometimes you get a question and it's really really hard to answer a question with a quote with a project or a strategy it's difficult because there's still a lot to be taught and there were still a lot to be educated on these topics and that's basically what can we do to create a digital culture that everybody in your organisation understands the value of digitization and driving business value out of it what would be your first what would be your starting point for this journey
Michael Morton: 5:54
For me it always starts with the first the question and by the way it's probably not going to be the question you end up answering it's just the way it is but starting with this question can you tell me this just start with that as the beginning of any of your questions can can you tell me this but then you quickly get into okay let me try to answer that question for you what's generating the data where is it coming from who owns it what tools are we going to use do i have the skills do i have the right level leadership within my company to invest in this do i have the right platform can i trust my can i trust the data where do i even produce the data to answer the question and i can go on and on and on and give you all these questions that you suddenly realise that you don't have answers to to answer the original question so that really starts demonstrating that long life cycle of saying oh my gosh we don't have the right culture in place we don't have the right processes in place i mean we might not have the right leadership in place we might not have the right skills in place and so it is amazing how complicated it becomes and then suddenly you realise that you can't answer that first question because you lack all these elements to run a process to basically become a digitised or a digitally transformed company very it's very difficult
Mike Veldhuis: 7:26
in preparation to this episode i explained something i experienced firsthand with a customer of ours that we really want to help develop a digitized strategy and you asked me what's the problem and i was i would be very happy if i could answer you with a straightforward answer this is the problem because then you can work on the solution right but most of the time it's just not one problem there are several problems we try to address and to make it a little bit more specific and to not make it sound fake the example is that a lot of the companies we work with they want to deliver something to their customers is to chain and they often get questions from their customers we want this we want to buy product but the project products doesn't exist at this stage business developers face these issues all the time because they want to innovate they want to move forward they want to be smarter than than competitors and the funny thing is that in this case this organisation really has a digital strategy they want to be more digitised over time so the business developers are focusing on this challenge but their own organisation is still hesitant they're sticked to their original job you know so this is a challenge is this something you experience in the US as well is this something you have in your own experience as well is this something you have if this is the problem this will be my problem definition do you have the answer to solve this
Michael Morton: 9:32
i would be all knowing if i can answer that question let's put it that way and as i'm listening to you talk about this i'm thinking how i generally think and that is it is a problem so now how do you start overcoming the problem doesn't happen overnight it's not a company wide announcement that suddenly things change and i tend to In my own experience, which is part of my job responsibilities, so part of the reason why I'm grateful that you and I are actually doing these is because I can draw from personal experience about what what are my What are, what is my responsibilities right now. And that is start small, you always hear me say that, start with a small group of people to focus on a problem. Focus on these small challenges, build momentum, demonstrate the first wave of value. And so to me, it's a start small, and then run fast. And this is a perfect example of just find the problem. Solve as many of the challenges as you can as fast as possible technology skills, find the right people you might not have, you might not know who the right people are from the beginning. But find the people that you think you need, build a small team 3,6,8 people doesn't matter. And then start chipping away at these challenges that we've talked about, and try to generate some momentum. And is also one of the thing that you said, which was part of the reason why I said it is likely that you will not produce the answers from your original question that you asked the business. Because this is the greatest thing about being data driven is you will discover new insights, it's innovation around data, and new value that you've discovered from data that you never imagined was possible. And that's the most enjoyable part of this whole journey.
Mike Veldhuis: 11:40
Awesome. Awesome. And what I would really like to add is that originally, we came from infrastructure, so and the infrastructure business, we still have, we talk with it with the IT staff with the IT department. And I sense that IT like, like we knew it is getting more and more isolated. Because digitization is far more than data centre infrastructure. It's, it's talking with the business and making a translation to ones and zeros or hexadecimal like behind us. And if you say start with a small team, I think there is a huge opportunity for does people who are in IT operations who are like we used to know the typical IT department to educate the rest of the organisation step out of the comfort zone of infrastructure, because those people talk and think digital, maybe for 10 or 20 years. And if they would adopt this change of digitization and share their knowledge, I think that would really help organisations to speed up the process. I really, I really do. And the original role of the IT director could be crucial to this, the CIO as as an essential part into driving digitization.
Michael Morton: 13:26
Boy, I'm often tempted to pull out one of my other phrases. First of all, none of this is possible without infrastructure, you have to have it. You have to make it available in a very accelerated non or frictionless way to those that need it. But also, just like in the first episode, when we talked about your mobile phone, there's a phrase that I like to say, and that is your IT infrastructure reflects your business. What does it say about your business? IT admins need to think about their shifting, it's not just supporting to make sure that everything's powered up, and nothing's burning up. And they need to think about what does it mean to take their role as an IT admin, and now use information that is generated in these environments? and share it with the business about insights about how is the business operating based on IT infrastructure?
Mike Veldhuis: 14:35
Wow. 15 minutes. times is already up. And I'm quite excited about our next episode, Episode Three. Ready, set, go! Where we actually going to talk about how you're turning your business intelligence strategy. So we're going to link episode one and two into actions Thank you, Mike. Thanks, Mike. And then see you next week.
Michael Morton: 15:05
See you soon.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai