Unlocking datas value for

better insights and decisions

Joint business and IT journey makes Dells business intelligence data more
useful and predictive

Customer profile
Company
Industry
Country
Employees
Website

Dell
Technology
United States
110,000
www.dell.com

Business need
Dell sought to unlock the value of its
disparate yet ever-growing mountains
of data to help improve decisions,
boost productivity and lower costs.

Solution
IT and business leaders together took
a step-by-step approach to transform
a complex data landscape by focusing
on standardized data sets, governance
and culture change before
technology solutions.

Benefits
Increased analytics capabilities by
more than 20 percent
Exceeded 99 percent data
synchronization across billions of
records in multiple data sources
Reduced nonstandard KPIs and
metrics by 50 percent
Increased automation of standard
sales reports and dashboards by 40
percent
Enabled self-service for predictive
and prescriptive analytic reports
Cut business intelligence costs
almost in half

The partnership between Dells business and

IT leadership was vital to our success. Before,
business groups and IT endured costly, timeconsuming cycles. Now we work hand-inhand.
Doug Hillary, Vice President of Performance Analytics, Dell

Solutions at a glance
Application Services
Big Data

With data growing exponentially from so many different

sources including transactions, operations, email,
social media, images and video managing it has
become a big headache for many companies. But an
even larger challenge is tapping into all of a companys
data for valuable insights that can help both guide and
drive its business forward, not just tell it where its been.

Centralized
governance also
helped streamline,
inform and drive the
IT roadmap, which
is critical. Otherwise,
the different parts of
Dell would go back
to doing their own
data analytics and
reporting again.
Tony Pladies, Executive Director,
Information Capital and Data
Science, Dell

Dell is no different. It knows these big

data challenges all too well. Before
starting its multiyear journey to
rationalize an extremely complex data
landscape in 2013, Dell didnt fully
understand its sales performance,
despite generating $62 billion in global
revenues in fiscal 2012.
The reason? According to Doug
Hillary, vice president of performance
analytics, Dell lacked standardized KPIs
and performance metrics that would
allow executive management, sales
leaders and frontline sales makers to
have an accurate and consistent way of
measuring and managing performance.
We had an influx of data but a limited
ability to perform meaningful analytics
since the data was stored in so many
disparate places, he explains. We
needed to strengthen Dells approach to
business intelligence, gaining alignment
across our many businesses and BI
executive sponsorship to drive the
improvements needed.
Different versions of the truth
BI and reporting were done on a projectby-project basis. We lacked consistent
business rules or global standards, so
reporting reflected regional or countryspecific data only. This yielded different
versions of the truth, which executive
management had to sort out, and they
ended up spending more time defending
the data instead of gathering critical
insights, Hillary adds.
Tony Pladies, Dells executive director
of information capital and data science,

points out that this disparity placed a

heavy burden on IT, who spent more
time managing the data instead of
conducting value-add analytics. Our
data management and reporting model
was IT-heavy, and needed more balance
between IT and the business, he recalls,
noting that Dell holds more than 13
billion records. The businesses had little
self-service capability. In many cases, as
much as 80 percent of peoples time was
spent moving and manipulating data, not
doing real predictive analytics. People
were expending lots of IT cycles and tons
of data warehouse horsepower just on
data extracts.
A shadow IT infrastructure
Pladies adds that Dells various business
lines adopted methodologies of their

Products & Services

Services
Dell SAP HANA Services
Hardware
Dell Storage SC8000
controller
Dell Networking S4820T
switches
Dell Networking S60 switches
Dell PowerEdge R920 rack
servers
Dell SAP HANA Solution
Software
Dell Statistica

own, which spawned fragmented BI

efforts and inefficiencies. Complicating
this was an emerging shadow IT
infrastructure as these businesses started
building their own systems that did
not scale, comply with IT standards or
perform to expectations, he says. And
adoption was low, too, so a lot of these
investments did not produce a return.
As Hillary saw it, Dells sales groups might
have optimized their own data analytics,
but Dells broader data landscape as a
corporation was sub-optimized. Not
only was this fragmentation inefficient
and costly, but it also wasnt coherent
and connected, he says. It was difficult
because it limited our ability to leverage
and share best practices globally and
raise the bar for everyone as a result.
Dells data management, reporting
and analytics approach, which was
ingrained in company behavior, needed
improvements. Hillary knew Dell
needed a comprehensive business
transformation. Based on our best
assessments of our challenges, we knew
this transformation would take about
three years, he says. We realized we had
to do much more than just consolidate
our data in a data warehouse. We had to
establish standards, create governance
and move everyone toward a new way
of thinking and operating. Moreover,
reporting is not the end game. It is
what we do with the data and reporting
that matters. Ultimately, we needed to
become much more effective at how
we analyze the data and provide insights
so we can make better, faster and more
proactive decisions.
Embarking on a business
transformation journey
Enabling the process was great timing
in 2013 Dell was in the midst of a $24
billion private buyout as well as many
strategic acquisitions to broaden its
portfolio of solutions and services.
Going private provided an opportunity to
accelerate the BI transformation.

To get the transformation started, Dells

executive and sales leadership appointed
Hillary to a cross-functional role that
established the Performance Analytics
group in early 2014. His group took
ownership for reporting, analytics and
data management across all of Dells
sales functions plus governance.
One of Hillarys first priorities was to form
a Business Intelligence Council with
executives from across Dells lines of
business and functions, especially IT, to
help move the effort forward. Dells vice
chairman became executive sponsor,
a level of commitment that Hillary
considers a critical factor in achieving
any such business transformation.
The partnership between Dells
business and IT leadership was vital to
our success, he says. Before, business
groups and IT endured multiple
costly and time-consuming cycles of
requirements-gathering, refinement and
development. Now we work hand-inhand.
Common set of key performance
indicators needed
Another foundational move started
in late 2013 and eventually took nine
months to complete: to develop a set
of common key performance indicators
(KPIs) on which to run Dells sales
business. Examples include forecast
revenue, pipeline visibility and number of
sales quotes issued.
Common KPIs were vital to Dells
business transformation because they
would greatly simplify the data structures
and enable building new analytics
capabilities much faster. Upstream
business processes were standardized,
too, to ensure that BI data sets and
approaches were the same. This would
further drive overall efficiency and cost
savings in Dells data management and BI
analytics.

Theres never
a best time to
transform your
company. For Dell,
the status quo
couldnt continue.
Doug Hillary, Vice President of
Performance Analytics, Dell

To develop these common KPIs, we

got more than 80 sales executives
from all of our different businesses and
regions worldwide to agree on the most
important ones we needed to manage
sales worldwide, Hillary says. It wasnt
easy and it took time, but now we have
simplified, standardized metrics, with an
ongoing governance process to keep
the business aligned and hold the right
people accountable.
Business alignment before technology
solutions
Technology discussions were purposely
left off the table until the KPIs and
governance issues were nailed down.
After those important steps, the BI
Council agreed to push most reporting
into the business. The business needs
the flexibility to create and maintain
reports that drive their function, while
IT innovates and optimizes data use,
sharing and compliance to increase the
strategic value of information, Pladies
says.
ITs next step was to enter into codevelopment projects with the business.
Dells business has tech-savvy people,
so we figured, Why not leverage them
on IT projects? Pladies recalls. We also
opened up data labs in our Enterprise
Data Warehouse where the business
could innovate in an IT-sponsored
ecosystem. Our business partners didnt
need to extract data anymore. They
were free to have a place where they
could load their own data, explore new
analytics and lead business operations.
Next, IT began to work with the
businesses to develop a common Dell
reference architecture and a three-year,
data management strategy across the
company. The strategy included panDell data standards: a common set of
terminology, hierarchies, attributes and
values, and tools and infrastructure.
Centralized governance also helped
streamline, inform and drive the IT

roadmap, which is critical, says Pladies.

Otherwise, the different parts of Dell
would go back to doing their own data
analytics and reporting again.
Next step: Design and deploy the
Business Management System
By April 2014 with the reference
architecture as its blueprint Dells
SAP HANA services team designed
a standard, virtualized Business
Management System (BMS) to rationalize
BI reporting and spending. This led
to the funding needed to develop
and implement the BMS on a big data
platform and have one place across the
entire company from which to track sales
performance against the standardized
KPIs.
The BMS incorporated Dells SAP HANA
solution, a hardware appliance thats
based on two Dell PowerEdge R920
servers and includes a Dell Storage
SC8000 controller and Dell Networking
S4820T and S60 switches.
Moving toward a more mature
predictive analytics model
Although its data modeling and analytic
tools were originally SAP HANA Studio
and SAS, respectively, Dell migrated
to its own Statistica platform, a more
powerful yet easier to use analytics
software suite. It provides full support for
the entire analytics lifecycle, including
model management, real-time scoring
and business rules. It also simplifies
data mining, predictive analytics, and
the analysis of both structured and
unstructured data.
Hillary notes that the migration to Dell
Statistica was extremely smooth and
fast just six months thanks to the
joint efforts by IT and the business and
the coordination of the BI Council. After
working together for many months
prior to the migration, it was a relatively
smooth process. The business leaders
drove the migration, with strong support
from IT and Dells Software Group.

Along with the standardized KPIs, the

single sources of truth via the BMS,
analytics and decision sciences skillsets,
and the right tools and processes,
Statistica has helped Dell move toward
a mature predictive analytics model,
Hillary says. We still have to collect
and report using our data, and were
now spending much more of our time
performing analytics to support better
decision making and taking actions
based on those.
Major cultural changes required
Dells business transformation required
major cultural changes, as well, Hillary
says. Cultural change is always hard. This
type of partnership, in which business
and IT operate hand-in-hand, required
changes top-down and bottom-up.
One top-down initiative was identifying
change agents among Dells executive
and senior management teams, who
could help model the new way and
help enforce governance as needed. IT
developers were put in the businesses
to help them develop the skills to create
their own reports, while proactively
supporting them in various needs and
challenges, even ones not on the BMS
roadmap. We broke the culture of
moving data to users, Hillary says. By
enabling self-service, we brought users
to the data.
Whats more, Dell recently launched
a Decision Sciences Academy. Hillary
explains that it provides a consistent,
standardized training model for using
proven analytics methodologies and
Dells tools and processes like Statistica.
We wanted our Decision Sciences
certification to be prestigious, so the
curriculum had to be demanding, he
says. That lets people feel proud about
achieving their certification and even
brag a little.
Dramatic business impacts across Dell
So far, the results have been remarkable
across all of Dells business. Nonstandard

KPIs and metrics have been cut in half.

Data is synchronized across more than
99 percent of records, regardless of
their source. Users now access reports
themselves, without having to call IT.
All this has helped Dell boost IT and
business productivity dramatically, while
cutting its BI costs almost in half.
The savings and improved productivity
have enabled funding for more analytics
capabilities, which have been expanded
by more than 20 percent. Instead of
just historical views of our performance
data, were gaining insights we never
had before, and we are now moving
faster toward providing prescriptive and
predictive analytics, Hillary says. And
because its now all self-service, business
owners get their reports much faster.
In fact, by 2015, Dells BMS had increased
the automation of sales reports and
dashboards by 40 percent. Users were
also experiencing 60 percent faster
response times for prescriptive and
predictive analytics.
The journey continues
Our progress in our big data journey
has led us to extend our BI Councils
charter across Dell and create Centers of
Excellence for disciplines like marketing,
HR, operations and finance, Hillary says.
Theyll all leverage the same big data

architecture and platform, while defining

relevant KPIs. Governance will continue
being critical to ensure compliance,
access control and appropriate
spending.
Hillary is pleased but not yet satisfied with
Dells BI transformation journey. Going
forward, he aims for Dell to improve
data quality and provide the business
with a unified integrated BMS. He wants
to enhance the companys analytics
capabilities and has also recently created
dedicated teams to accelerate the use of
analytics to mine the data they are now
housing in the BMS and data warehouses,
so they can better detect patterns, trends,
outliers and other information that will
greatly improve decision making. He also
envisions mobile reporting and wants
to push analytics down into middle
managements and front-line sales ranks.
Hillary has been a tireless champion
of how other companies can embark
on a similar journey and with the same
success. His advice to other companies
facing challenges like Dells is twofold:
Its a journey so be patient. Get executive
sponsorship and ensure the right level
of curiosity and accountability in the
business along with partnership with IT
to make the journey a reality.

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this case study. Reference Number: 10022393 May 2015. Dell Inc. All Rights Reserved