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Setting a course for integrating IT operations to bring together Dell and EMC in the largest merger in high-tech history is a bit like climbing a mountain. You need to decide where to start and map out the path you will take to get to the top. Defining Dell IT’s (the name of the new combined organization) journey for integration was the first step as we began the process of molding both companies’ IT resources into one IT organization to serve what was becoming a 140,000-person global company. And while we still have a ways to go in our integration effort, here are some of the methods we used and lessons we learned so far that might make your IT integration journey a little less daunting.
Deciding the what What we found as we began the IT integration was that we had far more work and even greater desire to integrate systems and processes than we had time to accomplish out of the gate. We needed a framework to focus our priorities. We turned to an integration committee of key leaders from business groups across both companies, including IT, called the Value Creation Integration Office (VCIO) for guidance. IT plugged into the VCIO’s guiding principles, criteria, approach, scope, timeline, and decision-making framework to come up with five pillars spelling out that our IT integration priorities would focus on one of the following:
We worked closely with stakeholders to rigorously set priorities, walking them through the framework for making decisions and making them aware of what we were going to be able to achieve and what we couldn’t. Bringing people together Once we decided what we would focus on, we turned to how we would do it. That began with bringing people together, which turned out to be one of the most important aspects of the integration. Creating effective integration teams was all about building relationships and forging a level of trust between the legacy EMC and Dell team members. We did that through frequent in-person workshops— first to understand each other’s as-is landscapes and challenges and then to structure teams and define how we would work with our colleagues across each VCIO workstream. Once we understood user requirements and what was needed for Day One of our official merger, we set up plans to map out what was possible. We also established plans for what was required for the start of the next fiscal year, which for us is February 2017, and what set of projects we should focus on for six months after that. Since we viewed the integration in a 30-month window, we further spelled out a number of incremental capabilities as long-term deliverables. As with any project, fitting the scope within the budget was a challenge. Having strong executive support and a top-down focus was an important factor here. I was also pleasantly surprised by how well the teams, which came from different organizations, worked together to put the best options forward to make the integration a success. Weighing solutions As we defined solutions to address each challenge, some themes emerged as we evaluated options: use manual processes; stand up a brand new system; integrate between two systems; or choose to go with one or the other system. In making these decisions, we weighed how much time an option would take to deliver, what it would cost, and whether the benefits were worth it. We also based our choices on a North Star vision of where we wanted to go with each solution five years out to make sure the selected options wouldn’t conflict with longer term goals and end up as throwaway work. One example of where we decided to do nothing was our Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems. After evaluating the time and resources it would take to consolidate Dell’s Oracle-based ERP and EMC’s SAP-based ERP, we found it did not result in an adequate ROI to justify the effort. We concluded that it was okay to have two ERP systems for a while, and build some limited integrations. For our human capital management system, however, we opted to stand up a new system given the importance of managing 140,000 employees. Adding to that decision was the fact that both companies had already been looking at replacing their legacy HR systems. Lessons learned It would be impossible to pass along all the insights we learned thus far in this vast integration, but here are a few that stand out as I reflect on our journey so far:
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