The Transformational CIO: Leadership and Innovation Strategies for IT Executives in a Rapidly Changing World

Faster and Cheaper

Robin was not hired by Dell to be a ruthless cost-cutter. And he doesn't see himself as some kind of hyperefficient IT bean counter.

“I didn't come in with a cost-reduction mandate. In fact, the people in IT would have loved me if I had just kept the budget flat. It would have been a very popular decision within IT. A flat budget would have been considered a success—but it would have killed our credibility with the business units,” he says.

He needed credibility with the business units to accomplish his real mission, which was helping the overall business—Dell Inc.—become more agile, more nimble, more responsive, and more successful in ultracompetitive markets all over the world.

This wasn't an isolated strategy. We didn't just say, “Hey, let's take $200 million out of costs.” Our goal as an IT organization was delivering solutions faster, extracting more value and more productivity for every development dollar that we spent.

We knew that to accomplish this, we would need to standardize platforms. That, in turn, enabled us to reduce our costs, because standard platforms are simpler to support, simpler to operate, [and] require less software and fewer data centers.

So this whole strategy was really about speed and cost. That was a new one for me, because usually faster isn't cheaper. We all learned some important lessons here because this really is faster and cheaper.

As a bonus, the new approach to cost reduction freed up money that allowed the IT organization ...