Digital Workplace Solutions

Hello. Welcome. Thanks for pressing play and listening to another episode of Digital Heroes. Today, I'm talking with Will Hudson, vice president, marketing IT at Dell Technologies. Welcome, Will. Thanks for joining me today. Hey. Thanks for having me, Steve. It's great to talk to you. So when I think about Dell Technologies, I think about Dell as an icon in tech. Alright. I think about a company that has a rich of innovation. I think about a company just a few years ago was the home to the largest technology merger in history when Dell and Delium c join forces. How would you begin to describe the employee experience at Dell Technologies? Well, that's a great question. We're really proud of all of those brands, and we're really proud of the Del Technologies family that we put together. It does make for quite an immersive and intense employee experience. As you might imagine, we have a lot of resource across the entire broad spectrum of the family of companies. And so making sense of the all those different resources available to employees, it can be confusing at times and a lot of times hard. Which is actually one of the reasons why we, adopted Coveo as our internal search is to help, give us some clarity to that. So if we kinda step back and start to unpack the employee experience, and there's a formula, right, that drives a great employee experience what role does technology play in that formula for Dell? How how are you thinking about technology? Yeah. I it may sound a little cliche to say it this way, but, We kind of, drink our own champagne at Dell. We sell employee transformation, of course, to our customers and help our employees transform or our customers transform their employee experiences as well as their own, technology experiences. But we we leverage technology to its fullest extent. Technology is at the heart and core of everything we do. And, maybe sometimes a little bit too much. We do see a lot of times when we have proliferating technology that sometimes competes And so a lot of times we have to, surface some knowledge content, some training resources. We have to leverage all of these things in order to make sense of this, complex web technology. And, search integrated search is actually one of the key ways that we do that. We've been on a really fantastic journey using Coveo in an intelligent search to really help our employees find the things that are really the most relevant and critical to them at every point along their, journey? Some organizations frame their technology as a as a digital workplace platform. But, you know, when you think about digital employee experience and digital workplace, it's it's a composition of multiple different platforms. And so for for Dell Technologies, what are the pillars, what are the core technologies that are kind of the foundation of the experience that you guys are creating today? I imagine we're not very much different from anybody who's viewing this video. Obviously, you know, we have technologies that support everything. From staffing and hiring and interviewing all the way through managing my benefits and doing my day job and work on the job work resources. And so each one of those tech each one of those sort of functional pillars brings its own technology from HR support systems to benefits management systems, to on the job support systems and CRMs and all of that kind of thing. And so we stitch all that together really we bring it together the first time for the employees really around that intranet experience. That's that homepage, landing page for everybody to start their work days. We try to bring as many of the resources to bear as we can there, but that homepage is the one landing page for all the employees, the where we communicate. Going on at the company, what's happening, you bring together all the resources from all the different departments in one place so that when comp when employees log on that first time, there it is right in front of them. And front and center on the top is the search that we use to really tie together the, you know, this thing I'm looking for, it's not on my direct l one nav when I on my home screen. Where do I find it? I go type it in the search and boom. There it is. A curated, intelligent list of search results. And I will tell you from personal experience, I'd say probably about ninety five percent of the time when I want something and I search for it, first result. It's interesting when I when I look at some of the analyst per actives around the internet platforms and enterprise search often the advice is to separate those two projects. Right? It's to compartmentalize them. It's to attack them from two different initiatives. And it sounds like you've you've thought about them holistically, or you've you've thought about the kind of colors of your digital play experience, the the core applications that you're using, and you've thought about search integrated with those Why did you do that? How did you do that? What did that process look like? It's a good question because we actually kind of went down that blind alley of that advice at first. And said, like, we want everything to be kinda siloed and being its own little thing. And so when an when an employee has an HR problem, they know I go to my HR portal and I search for it on my HR and wanna IT problem. I go to the, you know, my IT portal and I search for it there. The problem we got with that was actually users hated it. They gave they keep giving us feedback that said, like, why are why are things so siloed? Like, why is it when I happen to be browsing, my four zero one K, and I I suddenly have an issue with my PC, and I wanna get it fixed. I need to submit an IT trouble ticket. And I go search for it. Like, I can't get IT results by searching on the HR page. What we found was there were really, there was a there was also a disconnect on the quality of search results. When we didn't index everything, it just sort of, the the relevance fell off. And so we, we decided that the answer was, like, okay. Well, let's abandon that approach, and let's put it all together and see what happens. And what we found was a massive increase in employee satisfaction search results, satisfaction, and actually a big increase in the quality of search results. It's it's a great point. I think about internet platforms of the past and and oftentimes we've gone through these cycles where you launch an internet and and sort of two, three years later, it's it's stale, content is is stale and unused, and you're looking at relaunching going back process. And so the when you think about digital employee experience, it's very much an and I have solution, and you're constantly evolving. Your business is constantly evolving. You need to constantly evolve the tech stack to support your business, your employees, what they need. As we look forward, even in the next couple of months, there's a whole new environment that we're gonna be operating in and a new normal for many organizations and many people. How are you thinking about kind of the future of the digital employee experience and and what that evolution's gonna look like maybe in a couple months from now and and months from now? Yeah. That's actually a really good question because we're kind of in active conversations about that. Like, this this whole COVID response has highlighted the importance of having a single touch point where all of our employees come together at the start of their day. It has been a critical vital resource for us in communicating our plans, getting what we need employees to do and be aware of and not do. So it has been really a crucial lunch pendant. As we think about the evolution of it, we want to extend the capabilities as a communication tool, but we also want to sort of highlight, the the resources and get more intelligent about how we position resources for employees to be able to leverage. One of the strengths of our platform is is that we have built it as a community. So it is built on a community platform technology. And so we have the ability to easily stand up new communities for our employees to engage with each other, and that creates a really vibrant culture. It also proliferates a very large amount of content that we then have to sift through. Coveo helps us a lot from a search perspective, but the the things that we're really thinking about the next steps are do we leverage that community technology to really bring together the relevant, groups of employees to be able to have the right conversations to take our business to the next level. While at the same time, maybe curating out a little bit of the contents and shutting down some of the old stuff that we don't need and getting a little bit more sort of in the governance of standing up and shutting down. And how do we how do we do that in the face of other new technologies that are really taking hold in this crisis, like Microsoft Teams and Slack, Those are fantastic powerful tools that allow teams to collaborate together. How do we bring them more into the conversation as well? And the current environment, I think, is forcing all organizations to take a hard look at in the mirror, ask themselves how can we emerge stronger from this period of of change? And so There's no doubt that that Dell is well positioned to do so, and and well, it's it's been a pleasure. Thanks for sharing some of your insights today around around how you're working Yeah. It's my pleasure. Thank you for, inviting me and taking the time to listen.

When our nurses and doctors are sitting down with a patient, they may need to grab certain information about a drug or a procedure. They need access to that documentation instantly, And they've always relied on my team to provide a solid search solution for that. I'm guessing it's typical for all kind of large bodies of content, but we have eighty percent of our users looking for twenty percent of our content. The other twenty percent of our users are looking for these random things that are spread across this other eighty percent of content. So you get the the kind of long tail effect where you can't predict what someone's going to be searching for, can't predict how they're going to search for it. And we spent so much time over the years trying to play the game of manipulating the search rankings and manipulating featured results and adding synonyms and trying to always stay one step ahead of our users, machine learning has done away with that. Now the machine learning is doing all that heavy lifting and we sit back and get to watch and celebrate a successful platform. So we're an academic medical center, not for profit. Do about three billion a year in revenue with about six hundred thousand patients in South Central Wisconsin. Our goal at UW Health is to provide remarkable patient care for patients and families. Part of providing that care is getting them the right information at the right time. If a physician or a nurse can't find the document they need, can't find the information they need, Now our patient experiences suffering because they're waiting. They don't want to wait. If heaven forbid they find the wrong information, that could be even worse. My team is comprised mainly of, developers and systems engineers. We build custom web applications that serve various, enterprise needs. We oversee all the marketing technology stack. We, develop and maintain our hospital intranet. All of the clinical knowledge management passes through my team. We also provide all of our search capabilities as well for both public facing and internal websites. We hear every day from end users how critical it is With past experiences when we went live with a new search product, it was never smooth. There was always dramatic changes in the search results and then it was weeks and months of trying to Fine tune that search experience to get it back to where it needed to be. With Kaveo, we went live. We turned the Google search appliance off and turned the Coveo on And we got no response. So to put that into context, previously we got a flood of support requests and flood of angry emails saying what's wrong with the search. Why isn't search working? On day one of Coveo, typed in their normal search term and there it was there. That was without machine learning turned on because we hadn't we didn't have any data yet. But then a month, two months later when we had machine learning Actively working. We saw our results to get even better. Eat Better. Even better. And it further solidified the fact that we no longer have to play the game of trying to keep up with our users and anticipate what they might search. Machine learning model takes care of that. Really, our goal is that search and all the technology behind it is kind of an afterthought for the end user. They don't need to worry about how it works. They just know that it works and that they get what they need.