Dell EMC World 2017: Your Workforce Is Changing Whether You Like It Or Not

When talking about digital transformation, conversations quite rightly tend to be predominantly focused on technology and how platforms and services can be used to solve business problems.

But one area that can sometimes be overlooked, especially in the early stages of any transformation strategy, is the impact that the adoption of new technologies can have on employees as they adapt to modern ways of working.

That’s why, at Dell EMC World 2017 in Las Vegas, Dell has been keen to promote “workforce transformation” as being a key pillar of any business’s digital journey and that the notion of ‘work’ has fundamentally changed thanks to the proliferation of technology.

Transforming the workforce

“Digital transformation is not only going to drive transformation in IT, but also a transformation in the workforce,” said Dell Technologies president and CEO Michael Dell.

“The workforce and the workplace are changing. Work isn’t really a place anymore, it’s an activity that we perform in different ways, in different places and at different times”, so requires products and services that are “designed specifically for the way you do work”.

The likes of cloud computing, increased processing power and new functionalities are all combining to create a fundamentally different business ecosystem which, naturally, has an impact on how things get done.

This was echoed by Dell’s chief marketing officer Jeremy Burton, who spoke about the importance of enabling the workforce of today and preparing customers for what the workforce is going to become tomorrow.

“Because bandwidth and compute speeds have gotten faster, PCs are no longer tethered,” he said. “People work anywhere, any time and they work on any device.”

All of this has made equipping the workforce a key strategic focus for Dell Technologies, as CFO Tom Sweet explained: “As you enable a multi-cloud environment your workforce changes, how your workforce does its work changes.

“It’s no longer work as a place it’s about work as an activity, so having great endpoint devices, having great security within those endpoints and the ability to manage the ecosystem is extraordinarily important to us.”

The message was clear. We all know that modern technologies can enable employees to do a huge amount more than was possible even just a few years ago, so driving transformation out to the end users is essential if the full potential of ‘going digital’ is to be realised.

Continue to page 2 for more about today’s changing workforce…