NRFtech 2010 Retail Innovation

Yum! Brands CIO Delaney Bellinger moderated a panel discussion on the ways IT can help lead the charge for retail innovation. Joining her were Tim Theriault, senior vice president and CIO for Walgreens, and Sheila Jordan, vice president, communication and collaboration IT, for Cisco Systems.

One role the CIO always has to play is that of internal salesperson. How do you sell your CEO on a new technology?
Jordan: I think it’s important to do it by telling stories. You need to set the context — place the technology in the overall strategy of the company. In IT, we have a tendency to start a story at Chapter 3, which is confusing. Start at Chapter 1 instead, so the executives you’re talking to will understand why you want to do whatever it is.
Theriault: At Walgreens, we’re going through a major transformation, so prototyping is a good way for us to get across what we are trying to do with a given technology.

Every day we’re swamped with new ideas, new offerings and new technologies. What filters do you use to evaluate what comes in?
Theriault: First of all, I ignore the “herd mentality.” If someone comes in who actually understands our business, I tend to listen.
Jordan: We do a lot of executive briefings of our customers. It’s very useful to listen to them and learn from their insights what might be valuable.

What will be the big differences in how we operate now vs. how we will operate five years from now?
Theriault: We need to change the way we deploy systems and technologies. We’re doing a lot of looking at outside vendors; one thing I’m pretty certain of is that the IT group will be smaller.
Jordan: IT will change radically. Collaboration/communication technology will allow us to work differently. IT’s role will converge as systems and technologies converge; my hope is that we will be thought of as an organization that can help grow the business.

How do you handle the blurring of the offline and online worlds, both for customers and employees?
Jordan: We have to stop thinking of offline and online as being different and think of a totally integrated experience. We have to come to grips with the fact that people do multi-task, and ask ourselves how that has relevance in the way people — especially young people — communicate.
Theriault: Walgreens is moving from being a retailer to being a service organization. In our view, social networking is fundamentally important, mainly because we can start to create a community of the pharmacist, the nurse and other practitioners and the store manager so they can start to collaborate and exchange ideas on what’s working vs. what is not. Also, one of the ways to make a service organization very powerful is to engage the employees to the greatest degree possible. We need to give them the technology they need to do the job, but also we need to give them the spirit of empowerment.

We have an initiative right now in which we are asking employees to say, “What does my Walgreens mean to me?” We post the answers to this on our intranet, and we enter them in a contest; the winners’ answers are posted throughout the company. In the future, in dealing with change, the idea of employee engagement will be very powerful.

We’re also working on a high-touch device that will be a phone, scanner and POS device all together. We now have 14 phones in the store; when a worker needs to use the phone, they have to go and find it, answer it and then go back to what they were doing before. We want to give them the ability to perform the job right where they are, so they can be more available to the customers and more productive at the same time.

Are you using social networking internally for employees?
Theriault: We’re in an early stage. A couple parts of the company are doing some prototyping.
Jordan: We’ve been working on this for about two years now. Out of a total of 67,000 employees, 43,000 are on the current first version of our integrated workforce experience, which we call Cisco Quad; it will be deployed globally in October across the company. It will have instant messaging, chat, video, phone, Twitter, etc.

Are you getting any pushback from the employees? The volume of e-mail and phone work people are doing is already overwhelming; how can we ask them to take on all this added content?
Jordan: We aren’t. What we’re actually giving them is a wider range of choice, so they can deal with a transaction whichever way is quickest and easiest.