In March, he visited Australia to meet Prime Minister Julia Gillard, in an encounter that Jackson Wells had played an instrumental role in arranging.
The meeting gave Mr Dell the opportunity to emphasise his company’s position as a global leader in service delivery to government and as a thought-leader able to bring great value to the community outcomes sought by the Australian government.
In addition, Michael was able to highlight many of Dell’s corporate social responsibility initiatives, including its role in providing the NSW Education Department with service support for the connected classroom program - which provides staff and students with opportunities to connect with each other through technology.
Other items on the agenda were Dell’s Women in IT executive mentoring program and the e-waste scheme, a national scheme initiated by Dell for managing electronic waste.
Mr Dell’s visit to Australia also gave him the opportunity to weigh in on e-health - a hotly debated issue. How can electronic health records improve the service and delivery of Australia’s healthcare?
He met with Health Minister, Nicola Roxon to communicate Dell’s international experience in e-health technologies as the world’s largest IT provider in healthcare.
A highlight of Mr Dell’s visit was his announcement that Dell will build a data centre in Australia, a response to demand from cloud computing customers. Australia is currently experiencing a crisis in data centre capacity as old data centres run out of power and space.
The announcement was well received by the media and led to headlines like “Dell offers new storage solutions” in The Australian Financial Review and “Dell plans to build data centre in Australia” in The Australian.
A range of IT publications including CIO and Techworld also covered the announcement in detail.
The success of Michael’s visit is hard to measure, but in two short days he met with leading politicians, spoke with key journalists, addressed employees and hit the ground to visit customers.
In a world where the word ‘electronic’ looms large in communication, the importance of face-to-face interaction cannot be underestimated.
One of the reasons why Dell has become so successful is because it is led by a man who believes in interpersonal as well as newer forms of communication.
