Executive Q and A: Robin Johnson

Dell’s Efficient Enterprise methodology is based on firsthand experience, and the result speaks for itself. Over the last several years, the company’s IT budget has consumed approximately US$1.2 billion annually. So far this year, Dell has reduced that amount by US$150 million and is on a trajectory to cut another US$200 million. Factoring in the cost avoidance of building a new data center, CIO Robin Johnson estimates Dell’s total cost savings will be close to half a billion dollars. The lion’s share of that money will be reinvested in innovative development and new applications.

In this interview, Johnson shares what he has learned along the way—including why Dell is a good test case for the Efficient Enterprise model, how the company has gone about the process of becoming an Efficient Enterprise, how standardization helped downsize the application base, why virtualization is so important, how to measure enterprise efficiency, and the best way to get started.

Also included: How Dell focused on standardization, simplification, and automation to migrate 97 percent of its servers to the x86 platform, reduce its application footprint by 25 percent per year over three years, and enable the IT staff to manage 130,000 servers and clients from a single console.