I was fortunate to spend a few days meeting with colleagues, analysts and above all, customers at Dell Technologies World. After the countless conversations and over 20,000 steps logged each day, something became clearer to me than ever before: we have an imaginary human business barrier.
Evolution of ‘the Machine’
I’ve been in the Services business for more than 25 years, during which time Services were always referenced within the context of hardware installation, machine configurations and performance analysis. Being a member of our Support, Deploy and Services team, an evolution – or I should say a revolution – was happening around me. I always knew it was there, and some customers witnessed it as well, but this is the first time the experience of the machine is more defined by the fact that nobody knows it is there, but they sure notice when it is not.
There is this imaginary barrier to business acceleration and success that I believe is not a barrier but an Unknown we can’t wait to discover.
Moore’s Law and the Sound Barrier
We have taken for granted for years that hardware and software are the triggers for the ‘can’t wait another day to upgrade’ events. Being the perpetual geek, I marveled at disk drives storing more and more data, or more and more RAM within servers. Measuring the next widget was based upon metrics of half the floor space, twice the speed and using 33% less energy as the previous generation. The digitization of our lives is upon us and we need to accelerate Moore’s law faster than ever before.
It’s a fact, right?
I totally disagree.
Services are the accelerant to the physics ‘laws’. We have laws of bandwidth, clock speeds and of course a special project of mine in breaking the speed of light barrier. (More on that effort in a later Blog). Before you chuckle; recall that the sound barrier was actually no barrier at all.
In the Interests of Human Potential
So what is my point?
Let’s break this down.
A long time ago we had ink and quills to document our thinking. Life was good. Then we automated that process and invented the typewriter. Life was better and more documents were created. Then we had the word processor/computer and life was better still. However, these tools were simply the enabler of the creative minds that have existed for thousands of years. Hardware and software are simply our instruments to unlock human potential. I like to think our Dell Services exist to unlock our customer’s human potential as well.
Summary
Don’t buy the latest computer, storage device or widget unless you consider what you can do with it and how it will improve your customer delivery model, impact your human and business efficiency plans, or simply allow you to break that human business barrier that is really no barrier at all.
It simply is a virtual one until we break through it.
