The retailer tapped former Foot Locker executive Adrian Butler to oversee technology and former Starbucks CTO Gerri Martin-Flickinger to sit on its board.
The retailer tapped former Foot Locker executive Adrian Butler to oversee technology and former Starbucks CTO Gerri Martin-Flickinger to sit on its board.
Esta entrada es un extracto. La nota completa está en CIO Dive.
Why it matters
When an organisation announces a turn like this, the announcement is rarely the interesting part. What matters is everything it forces to be reordered underneath: committed budgets, live contracts, teams built for something else. That is where you find out whether the decision had real backing or was a slide in a deck.
My filter is always the same: does this change a decision, or only a tool? If at the end of the quarter the same people are approving the same things by the same criteria, there was no transformation, there was a purchase. The difference shows up in the committee minutes, not in the press release.
What usually goes wrong
The classic mistake is confusing the plan with the execution. A three-year roadmap gets approved in a two-hour committee and nobody revisits it until there is a problem. Plans that work get reviewed every quarter and corrected without drama; the ones that do not get defended instead.
What to watch
- How the relationship with current vendors is left, which is usually where the dependency nobody measured is sitting.
- Who ends up owning the decision, and with what budget of their own rather than borrowed.
- Whether business metrics appear or only delivery metrics — cost per transaction beats percentage complete.
How I read this entry
The way I would bring this down to earth is in three moves: name an owner with their own budget, define two metrics reviewed in committee every month, and set a date on which somebody decides to continue or stop. It is unglamorous, and it is what separates programmes that land from programmes that get discussed.
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Living through this in your own team?
Open the chat and tell me how you're handling it. I'm interested in comparing notes.
