Will Hudson

Title: 
Vice President Enterprise Data Strategy, Customer, and Marketing IT, Dell Technologies
Year: 
2021
Category: 
Future of Work - Employee Experience
Result: 
Finalist

Will Hudson

Vice President Enterprise Data Strategy, Customer, and Marketing IT, Dell Technologies

Supernova Award Category: 

Future of Work - Employee Experience

The Organization: 

Dell helps organizations and people build their digital future, and transform how they work, live, and play.

The Problem: 

When Dell and EMC joined forces in 2016, it represented the largest technology merger in history. One of their unifying platforms was their intranet, Inside Dell – the place to go when you don’t know where to go, who to work with, or what to do. Inside Dell was the company’s lowest scoring enterprise application for employee satisfaction with an average ESAT score of 23%. Like at many organizations, the intranet was an under-invested technology, caught in a multi-year upgrade cycle that was more aligned with maintenance contracts than user needs. It wasn’t until a change in perspective, combining the intranet and search initiatives together, that a new vision for the digital workplace took shape. As an example, new hires, on Day 1, "had to go to 50 different places, that all look different, just to get up and running, and gain proficiency in their job."

 

The Solution: 

Relaunch Inside Dell. To support the changing work environment, the digital workplace must be a flexible, consumer-like computing environment for usability, autonomy, and community collaboration. A sampling of employees was gathered across each role in the business to map expectations and inform design decisions, to rebuild trust. With feedback, the team iterated, making small changes that led to big impacts to relevance and an exponential increase in satisfaction. Dell combined Adobe Analytics’ web metrics  with Coveo’s rich reporting to identify content gaps and understand what lead to successful outcomes. Every advocate helped change how employees viewed the intranet. Dell’s philosophy: Go above and beyond, and see the impact it has. Will Hudson said, "You’ve got to look at the big picture. It’s not just about where one digital product needs to go, but how an entire ecosystem of products needs to work together."  

The Results: 

ESAT on inside Dell has gone from 23% before the relaunch to 70% today. This was the most significant quarterly jump ever by an IT application at Dell and took home the prize of most improved application each quarter in its first year of operation. Inside Dell is now the application gateway when you can’t remember how to file an expense report; it’s the starting point for search when you don’t know who to turn to or where to look; and it’s the rallying point when you just want to know what’s new. It’s everything an enterprise intranet should be. So you can get in, get out, and get back to work. More and more employees began to rely less on bookmarks, and more on the search engine to locate what they were looking for. Search was not just for content, but people too. With the power of Coveo, a Dell employee doesn’t need to know a person’s name to find them; all they need to know is the skill they’re searching for. Today, Dell continues to expand its use of Coveo in its pursuit of relevance, as new content sources come online and business units are strategically aligned. Hudson says, “Coveo data and AI will help [our team] uncover preferences and priorities in order to build better experiences, whether it’s a new hire trying to navigate the business or a long-standing contributor just trying to stay connected.”

Metrics: 

ESAT on Inside Dell has gone from 23% before the relaunch to 70% today.

The Technology: 

The use of Coveo Relevance Cloud as the intelligence to provide a single experience across all of Dell's core employee applications, including Jive Software, ServiceNow, and Workday. Adobe Analytics Adobe Analytics’ traditional web metrics such as visits and pageviews combined with Coveo’s rich reporting helped identify content gaps and understand which employee interactions lead to successful outcomes to feed Coveo AI and ML.

Disruptive Factor: 

Coveo AI was the disruptive factor; understanding both context and what led to success for cohorts, enabled Coveo to automatically adjust relevance and create more successful experiences for all 165,000 employees across Dell.

Shining Moment: 

Hudson says, “Coveo data and AI will help [our team] uncover preferences and priorities in order to build better experiences, whether it’s a new hire trying to navigate the business or a long-standing contributor just trying to stay connected.”

About Dell Technologies

Dell Technologies - Dell helps organizations and people build their digital future, and transform how they work, live, and play.