When Sweetgreen CEO Jonathan Neman co-founded Sweetgreen 14 years ago, he and the founding team saw a remarkable opportunity to embrace technology both as a means to enhance customer experience, but to do the same for employee experience. The fast-casual restaurant was founded in 2007 in Washington, DC by Neman, and two friends who were fellow undergraduates at Georgetown University: Nicolas Jammet and Nathaniel Ru. (The company moved to Los Angeles in 2016.) Neman referred to how the company became a pioneer in online ordering, which would serve them well during the pandemic, as well as in helping manage the company’s supply chain, since most of the produce used in the company’s salads are procured in partnership with local and regional producers.
Neman underscored that the way technology has aided customer experience is through speed, choice, and personalization. “We want to lower the barriers to entry and make it more accessible to eat healthy food in line with our mission,” he said.
Neman quickly added that the company is in the early stages of its transformation. “While we’re probably a decade into the digital transformation, we’re still in the very early days in terms of how technology is going to disrupt the restaurant business and the food business. As a business gets to over 50% digitized, you can start to re-imagine the business model in a lot of ways.”
Neman sees tremendous advantages derived by the digital penetration of Sweetgreen’s business pre-pandemic that served it well during trying times for the industry across the past 17 months. “Where the rest of the world was playing catch up in terms of technology integration into the [customer] experience, we were built upon that idea, those ideals, and it was native to the experience already.” As a result, customers did not need to pivot too dramatically in order to eat at Sweetgreen during the pandemic.
As Sweetgreen has scaled, the business has grown in complexity. Therefore, the time was right to identify a seasoned leader to act as a steward for what is to come as the company continues to scale. Thus, Sweetgreen has hired Wouleta Ayele to be the company’s new chief technology officer effective August 17. She joins the company from Starbucks where she spent nearly 16 years, ending her tenure there as the senior vice president of technology. “When we met Wouleta, we were blown away by her leadership, her experience, and her perspective,” said Neman. “We thought she’d be the perfect partner to lead us through this next stage of our growth.”
For her part, Ayele was drawn to Sweetgreen based on the company’s mission. “It’s an innovative company that’s leading the way to a healthier future, and I wanted to be part of it,” she said. “The kind of talent that they’ve hired excited me and energized me, as well.”
Having been in food retail for so long, Ayele recognized that her experience will be helpful for a company that wishes to develop the reach and influence of the company she just left. Thus, she counts understanding what it takes to scale from roughly 130 stores the company currently has to an order of magnitude more than that. “Having a clear vision and strategy for [technology and its evolution], I take full, clear accountability for leading the charge on that,” noted Ayele. “[Another] area of focus will be delivering brand-differentiating capabilities. Also, leading with next-generation capabilities, data, and analytics while fostering efficiency will be a focus, as well.” She hastened to add that she views the work ahead as building upon the great work her new team has already done rather than a need to reinvent the technology function within Sweetgreen.
Neman underscored that the pandemic has taught us all to expect the unexpected and to ensure that the company fosters nimbleness as it plans for the future. “Instead of trying to predict the future in terms of what our customers or team members are going to want from a technology perspective, one of the ways in which we think about it is building and architecting a system that allows us to move at the speed of culture,” he said. “As the customer changes and as the business changes, we’re able to continuously stay ahead of those changes.”
Ultimately, Neman believes the pandemic has increased scrutiny on health. This has been an added advantage to the company as it has grown. “Sweetgreen has what I call the trifecta of healthy food, which [is that it] makes you feel good, [it has] an addictive quality and [we have] a customized and personalized [menu], which means you can eat Sweetgreen in every single day and eat something different every day for the rest of your life.”
Peter High is President of Metis Strategy, a business and IT advisory firm. He has written two bestselling books, and his third, Getting to Nimble, was recently released. He also moderates the Technovation podcast series and speaks at conferences around the world. Follow him on Twitter @PeterAHigh.
Join best-in-class technology leaders to learn how today’s top companies are driving digital transformations and maintaining an innovative edge amid a time of unprecedented change and uncertainty.
Our agenda is below. CIOs and other technology leaders, register here to reserve your spot today, and stay tuned for more updates.
Noon
Welcome
Welcome and introduction to the Metis Strategy team.
Peter High, President, Metis Strategy
12:10 – 12:25
Fireside Chat: Barbara Lavernos, Deputy CEO, L’Oréal
Barbara shares lessons from the company’s remarkable transformation, which has fused science and technology to create cutting-edge beauty products and design new digital journeys for customers.
Barbara Lavernos, Deputy CEO for Research, Innovation, and Technology, L’Oréal
12:25 – 12:45
Panel: Digital Acceleration and Innovation in Times of Uncertainty
By all accounts, the global pandemic has further accelerated the already rapid pace of digital transformation and increased the urgency for more robust business capabilities across all aspects of organizational operating models and business ecosystems. In this context, many organizations have found ways to strengthen business capabilities for the benefit of all stakeholders. The global CIOs of Corteva Agriscience and Johnson & Johnson will share how their teams have found unique ways to innovate, achieve higher levels of agility, and build sustainable resilience in the face of ongoing uncertainty.
Debra King, SVP, Chief Information Officer and Chief Transformation Officer, Corteva Agriscience
Jim Swanson, EVP & Enterprise CIO, Johnson & Johnson
Moderated by Alex Kraus, Vice President and East Coast Office Lead, Metis Strategy
12:45 – 1:00
Entrepreneur Spotlight: Mickey Boodaei, Transmit Security
Just weeks ago, Transmit Security raised $543 million in Series A funding and had a pre-money valuation of $2.2 billion, marking the largest Series A in the history of cybersecurity and one of the highest valuations for a bootstrapped company. In this fireside chat, Transmit Founder and CEO Mickey Boodaei the evolution of identity and authentication as the world moves toward a post-password future.
Mickey Boodaei, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Transmit Security
Moderated by Peter High, President, Metis Strategy
1:00 – 1:20
Panel: How Fifth Third Bancorp Drives a Culture of Innovation
Fifth Third Bancorp is among the largest money managers in the Midwest, with $483 billion in assets under management as of June 30. Greg Carmichael, the company’s President, Chairman, and CEO, joined the company in 2003 as Chief Information Officer. In this discussion, he shares lessons learned on his path to the CEO role and chats with the company’s current CIO about the company’s investments in FinTech and its continued push to build world-class digital capabilities for its customers.
Greg Carmichael, Chief Executive Officer, Fifth Third Bank
Jude Schramm, Chief Information Officer, Fifth Third Bank
1:20 – 1:35
Entrepreneur Spotlight: Ed Jennings, Quickbase
The CEO of Quickbase describes how automation, low-code and no-code platforms are enabling organizational agility and the role of Citizen Automation in the future of work.
Ed Jennings, Chief Executive Officer, Quickbase
1:35 – 1:55
Panel: IT-Led Breakthroughs and the Digital Shift in Insurance
Technology leaders from two major insurance companies will discuss the role of IT in defining and enabling the future of work, IT-led digital breakthroughs, and the foundational changes that digital capabilities are bringing to the insurance industry.
Lisa Davis, SVP & Chief Information Officer, Blue Shield of California
Mike Shadler, SVP & Chief Information Officer, Pacific Life
Moderated by Chris Davis, Vice President & West Coast Lead, Metis Strategy
1:55 – 2:15
Panel: A People-Focused Approach to Transformation
Organizations increasingly acknowledge that creating an outstanding customer experience requires enabling an equally outstanding employee experience. In this session, technology leaders will discuss how digital efforts focused on people are driving engagement and enabling the development of new capabilities.
Mike Giresi, Chief Digital Technology Officer, Molex LLC
Tim Dickson, Chief Information Officer, Generac
Moderated by Steven Norton, Co-Head Executive Networks, Research, and Media, Metis Strategy
2:15 – 2:30
Entrepreneur Spotlight: Bernadette Nixon, Algolia
Algolia processes more than 1.5 trillion searches per year across more than 10,000 business customers. In this session, CEO Bernadette Nixon discusses what’s next for search and the growing role that APIs play in delivering seamless customer experiences.
Bernadette Nixon, Chief Executive Officer, Algolia
2:30 – 2:50
Panel: Combining AI and IoT to drive digital processes
Companies today rely on a rapidly evolving combination of artificial intelligence and Internet of Things applications as they modernize their operations for the digital age. In this discussion, technology leaders share their insights on successfully scaling and monitoring these digital processes to drive efficiency and product innovation.
Vagesh Dave, GVP & Chief Information Officer, McDermott International
Danielle Brown, SVP & Chief Information Officer, Whirlpool
Moderated by Michael Bertha, Managing Director and Central Office Lead, Metis Strategy
Click here for highlights from our last Digital Symposium, or view the panel discussions on YouTube.
As the business world adapts to an era of hybrid work, companies are learning how to effectively foster collaboration across remote and in-office teams. To operate effectively in this new reality, teams must develop creative ways to bring new thinking to life when colleagues are spread across the country, or even the world. Fostering that collaboration is critical to ensuring firms can act in a nimble fashion, able to seize new opportunities and stave off potential threats as they arise.
Metis Strategy frequently uses design sprints as a way to foster collaboration and idea generation among teams. Traditionally, design sprints occur in person. Several people get together in the same conference space to map customer journeys, illustrate design concepts, and paste Post-It notes around a large whiteboard to generate new ideas. In a remote or hybrid setting, however, not everyone is physically in the conference room, making it tougher to quickly sketch a concept or add an idea to the board.
The Metis Strategy team has found that effectively conducting a remote design sprint requires a different approach and a new set of skills to ensure the exercise runs smoothly. For a recent client engagement, our team built and facilitated a five-day, fully remote design sprint. We brought together employees from across the US to develop a tangible solution to a challenge facing the team. Each day was designed to get the team thinking creatively and engaging with the problem at hand, including understanding the challenge, deciding on long-term goals, and mapping user experience, and prototyping a solution that could be tested on a target audience. In this instance, virtual whiteboarding tools (we used Miro) became a critical for facilitating a successful sprint.
Below are a few takeaways from our experience that can help teams that are conducting their own remote or hybrid design sprints:
While a remote design sprint doesn’t deliver the same experience as an in-person session might, we found it to be an effective framework for collaboration and idea generation. As hybrid work takes hold at many companies, we expect sprint facilitators and their teams to be increasingly fluent with virtual whiteboarding tools as they manage collaboration across virtual and in-person settings.
Like so many companies over the past year and half, Ralph Lauren has had its resilience tested as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. It had to shut down stores and offices, and had to advance efforts to better interact with customers and associates alike, safely.
Fortunately for the company, Janet Sherlock, who has been the chief information officer of Ralph Lauren for the past four years, initiated a number of initiatives that gave the company a leg up. Her purview is such that she has unusual influence for a CIO. She runs strategy and overall management of all of the technology including design conceptualization through to the point when products are distributed to either wholesale partners, the company’s stores, or directly to the company’s consumers. Her team is also responsible for store technology and the full ecosystem of in-product management and user experience. Additionally, Sherlock oversees all global digital platforms, marketing technology, data analytics, and data science. All of this is on top of global infrastructure, cybersecurity, IT risk, compliance, and privacy.
Among the fortuitous programs that were in place prior to the pandemic that aided the company’s transition during the pandemic was a hybrid flexible work arrangement called Flex Place. Upon this foundation, Sherlock’s team rapidly rolled out virtual appointment booking. Her team had already made significant progress on curbside pickup for customers. Completing its rollout ensured that the company could still do business through stores even if customers were unable or less willing to go in them.
“I think our biggest shift left efforts was probably in virtual stores,” said Sherlock. “We had been considering our approach to virtual stores before Covid hit but that was something that we pulled forward very quickly and aggressively. Our stores were such masterpieces, and the experience is so unique, we felt it was important to offer the world of Ralph Lauren to our customers, even if they couldn’t physically visit our stores.” Her team rolled out a rich virtual store experience and quickly integrated it with the company’s e-commerce platform so that customers could purchase certain products via hotspots directly from their virtual experience. “At this point, we have seven different virtual store experiences, and are continuing to build on the capabilities that we have in our virtual store environment,” noted Sherlock.
One of the thornier issues that Sherlock and team had to grapple with how to assist Ralph Lauren’s design and merchandising teams, each of whom relied and thrived on in-person collaboration. Sherlock’s team set up a design collaboration platform for them to use, and it proved to be a silver lining of the pandemic inasmuch as the teams developed new ways to work and collaborate. Now the design and merchandising teams anticipate an ability to continue to work both in person and virtually, adding flexibility to their work routines.
Another process that the company took for granted had to be done in person was the product approval process, which traditionally relied on in-person meetings to discuss milestones related to lines, styles, and fit approvals. It was long assumed that those involved had to be able to physically see and touch the material in order to make decisions. “We were able to leverage our 3D product development for the approval process, which also had the side benefit of streamlining the process,” said Sherlock. “We [also] had to create online experiences to replicate and replace our showroom visits, and support different virtual ordering processes for our wholesale partners.”
As Sherlock contemplated the future, she noted three strategic priorities: experiences, data, and automation. The overarching benefit of these foci should be greater nimbleness for the company. The experiences center around creating a variety of customer journeys and allowing customers to engage in the ways that best suit them rather than dictating how they shop and purchase products from Ralph Lauren. “Everything is interoperable between our online, our [marketing technology] and our in-store capabilities are blended together so we can create seamless experiences and we have some really cool ones planned for the future,” noted Sherlock.
Next, she believes data strategy will be a critical area of focus. “We’re being very deliberate about the overall data strategy for the core elements of data, things like our product data, our digital assets, our customer data, thinking strategically about where they’re stored, how they’re accessed and leveraged, how they’re maintained,” said Sherlock. “[This will impact not only] data analytics, but [it will allow Ralph Lauren] to serve up on a real-time basis things like personalization, real-time actions, real-time decision-making…Then, of course, it leads to our capabilities in advanced analytics and data science, which for us is a major area of emphasis and focus.” She refers to IT as the “connective tissue” of the enterprise relative to data, and that this is a discipline that will lead to better collaboration across the traditional silos of the company.
Sherlock believes that greater degrees of automation will improve the efficiency of all that IT delivers while further modernizing the practices of the company to better compete in the digital age. Sherlock and her team have implemented a variety of changes that have overturned decades of inherited wisdom about how business can be done, providing new benefits along the way. Necessity is the mother of invention, it is said, and many inventions have been created due to the necessities that the pandemic has driven.
In June, Sanjib Sahoo was named executive vice president and chief digital officer of Ingram Micro. He takes on this role with the company at an inflection point in its digital journey, as well as at a time of changing ownership for the company. Platinum Equity announced that it completed the acquisition of Ingram Micro from HNA Technology Co., Ltd, a part of HNA Group, on July 7, 2021 for a total enterprise value of $7.2 billion, in a transaction that includes $5.9 billion of equity value.
Ingram Micro’s CEO Alain Monie noted his excitement in Sahoo’s arrival at the company. “In his first few weeks in his new role as Chief Digital Officer, Sanjib has already proven to be an excellent fit to lead the continuation of Ingram Micro’s digital journey,” said Monie. “We are fortunate to gain a leader with a diverse and global background, tremendous technical depth, and a passion for creating an exceptional digital experience at this critical juncture in our digital evolution. He has been tasked with shaping and creating global competitive advantage and differentiation for our Technology Solutions and Cloud businesses through the development of innovative, world-class customer and user experiences.”
Monie also noted that Sahoo’s mandate includes leading the company’s current e-commerce platform IMOnline’s digital transformation to ensure the company’s customers can transact with Ingram Micro easily and intuitively.
Monie has tasked Sahoo with several initiatives related to building world-class user experience and platforms, including focusing on building changing consumption models and billing engines and leading modernization of the company’s legacy systems, which primarily serve the Technology Solutions business. “Data and machine learning is a critical component of where we are focused on building an insight-driven organization with the power of data,” said Sahoo. “Today, the vast majority of our revenues are derived from our Technology Solutions business and one of my big priorities is to focus on even better e-commerce execution through creating an integrated customer experience that is more self-service and enables solution-based selling through our platforms. There is a lot of work to lead digital transformation in a complex $49 billion annual revenue organization like Ingram Micro, but I am proud to be called on to continue the great journey that the company started few years ago.” In addition to platform innovation and e-commerce experience, Sahoo indicated that process automation will be an additional area of focus.
Sahoo joins Ingram Micro from XPO Logistics, where, for more than four years, he was the chief information officer of the Transport business. He was responsible for digital innovation, transformation, and overall technology operations including brokerage, intermodal, last mile, truckload, expedite, managed transport, and freight forwarding. Prior to his time at XPO Logistics, he was the chief information officer and chief technology officer of tradeMONSTER.
Blue Shield of California is an 83-year-old nonprofit health system that earns roughly $20 billion in annual revenue, but it caps its net income at 2% of revenue. As a result, the company has returned more than $650 million to customers and communities through its history. With 4.5 million customers across the state of California, the company has a mission to create a healthcare system that is worthy of employees’ family and friends while being sustainably affordable. The pandemic has transformed the way in which the company interacts with customers. There has been a digital relationship with customers that has deepened since March of 2020. Blue Shield of California has focused on being holistic and personalized while being high-tech and high-touch.
The leader who has catalyzed much of this change is the company’s chief information officer Lisa Davis. In her role, she runs information technology as well as the company’s data and analytics organization, while setting Blue Shield of California’s technology strategy.
Davis draws upon an unusually deep reserve of experience as a technology leader, having spent 26 years at the United States Department of Defense, rising to the post of CIO at multiple divisions of DOD. She was also a CIO at Georgetown University for nearly three and a half years. After that, she joined Intel, first as a technology leader, and then ran a $9 billion business for the company. All of this was prior to joining Blue Shield of California in February of 2020.
Davis has seen the past 16 months of the pandemic as a remarkable driver of innovation and change. By way of example, she referenced telehealth, which has been an area of focus for Davis, and an area of tremendous growth for the company during the pandemic. “Prior to the pandemic, there was a lot of consternation and a belief that telehealth wasn’t wanted by consumers and wouldn’t be leveraged or used by our members,” said Davis. “In fact, the pandemic showed just the opposite. Telehealth has soared almost 500%. We are seeing better health outcomes, and [in many cases] our members prefer telehealth appointments to having to go into the office.”
Davis also notes that an area that the healthcare system in the United States has lacked historically has been a holistic approach to personal health. The pandemic has underscored the need for the healthcare ecosystem to work more closely together to serve patients. Davis referenced Blue Shield of California’s Health Reimagined program as an example. “Imagine an experience where providers, members and payers have access to the same data; that we’re making decisions that are best for the member or the patient because they have all of the providers sharing information from a single electronic health record,” said Davis. “[We aim to make] decisions based on [information that is] holistic and personalized to that member.”
Davis believes that the best way to serve providers, members and payers is to re-orient the IT function to be more tied to the rest of the organization. She and her team have spent the last year developing a new operating model for the information technology function centered around portfolios and products. “We spent the last year changing our operating model to align against and support the key lines of business and key horizontal functions within the company,” noted Davis. “We have created seven different portfolios: three to support lines of business, four to create horizontal functions such as Medi-Cal, commercial business, senior markets, customer care, and marketing. Corporate services [is] a horizontal function and a large complex horizontal function [is] our Health and Growth Solutions organization, which has a big need around data and analytics capability.”
The portfolio teams have a variety of roles associated with each burgeoning partnership across the organization, including a portfolio leader, a solution delivery lead, solution architects, business architects, security personnel and data and analytics team members. Davis believes that this mix and the stronger partnership increases IT’s business acumen. “[This model creates a] basis of trust and a foundation with our business partners to improve collaboration, understand the opportunities that [they are] trying to solve, the capabilities that we’re trying to bring to market, so that those teams are connected hip-to-hip, working together to ultimately accelerate capabilities and services that we want to bring to market for our members,” said Davis. “That has laid a foundation [toward] being a cloud and data company that is required to support this new digital experience and vision of Health Reimagined that we want for our members.”
Davis joined Blue Shield of California only a couple of weeks before the company went into quarantine. As such, she became a test case for onboarding virtually, and she drew several lessons about how best to lead a team without the benefit of getting to know them in person. She has added more than 150 people to the IT team since the beginning of the pandemic, infusing the team with new talent at a time of great transformation, giving her ample opportunity to test those lessons. The first lesson in leading during these most unusual circumstances is to lead authentically. Davis indicated that it is necessary to “listen more, to understand where our employees are [personally and professionally], to understand the capacity for change that they can handle, to be connected to what all of our employees are dealing with.”
Second, she recognized the sanctity of communications. “I’m a firm believer that you can never communicate enough,” said Davis. “That engagement and trying to stay connected, keep the video on [on video conference calls], trying to find that connection with the employees has been extremely important in navigating this change.”
Third, she models perseverance with the team. These are uncertain times, and it is difficult to predict what opportunities or threats might be around the corner but being steadfast in moving the organization in the right direction remains paramount.
Davis draws strength that helps her persevere through her diverse set of experiences, and she understands that there is more that is common across those experiences than is different. “One of the beautiful things about being a technology leader is no matter what sector that you’re in, our challenges are all pretty much the same,” she noted. “We all address those technology opportunities at a different place, at a different maturity level. Our stakeholders are clearly different, but the technology opportunities and how we leverage technology to support mission or business outcomes doesn’t change.”
Barbara Lavernos has had a storied 30-year career at L’Oreal. She has had multiple promotions in recent months going from Chief Technology and Operations Officer of the company to President of Research, Innovation, and Technology in February 2021 to Deputy Chief Executive Officer in charge of Research, Innovation and Technology in May 2021. She indicated that her background and passion for tech-enabled innovation aligns with the company’s focus on science and innovation, which she noted: “have been at the foundation of our pioneering spirit and the success with our consumers as the L’Oréal DNA.”
Lavernos’ has driven a remarkable digital transformation at the company at the intersection of science and technology to create a powerful platform to develop advanced, personalized, innovative beauty products, services, and devices. “The science; agronomy and biotechnology allow us to renew completely our portfolio of raw materials,” noted Lavernos. “Green sciences are at the heart of the exploration of our innovation when it comes to product. Then with the exponential advance of tech, we think we are unlocking new breakthrough algorithm-based services and products. That is the idea of combining research and innovation—our roots, our DNA—with this revolution of technology. We look forward to developing innovation that pushes the boundaries of science and reinvents beauty rituals thanks to technology.”
Lavernos is passionate about what she refers to as BeautyTech. She defined the term as, “exponentially augmenting L’Oréal’s science that we have rooted [in] cutting-edge technology at scale.” She added that the company has the advantage of 112 years of knowledge and data about beauty rituals related to skin and hair. One of the biggest changes in recent years has been the focus on personalization. “In the past, most of the companies provided global products that [were believed to] suit everyone,” Lavernos said. “Today, we [have the capacity to know consumers] in real-time, to know their expectations, to know their environment, to know their skin because with virtual reality, with virtual try-on, we can have this dialogue with our consumers.”
By way of example, Lavernos highlighted an offering that was introduced at CES 2021 with the company’s Yves Saint Laurent brand. It is called Rouge Sur Measure, and it is a smart at-home method for consumers to create their own personalized lipstick, choosing from thousands of shades with one single touch. It is done through an app that can be installed on a smartphone or on a tablet. The app leverages artificial intelligence to allow the consumer to explore and try the color or the looks they want. Also, a consumer can take a picture of a pair of shoes or a handbag and match a lipstick color to them.
A second example that Lavernos offered is Lancôme Custom Made Foundation, which offers Le Teint Particulier, meaning a unique tint. It is a patented technology that creates a foundation that matches the skin tone of each individual. “The experience starts with taking a scan of the consumer’s skin, and it is done at the point-of-sale with three different places to have the perfect skin tone,” Lavernos explained. “Then this data is interpreted by the highly sophisticated algorithm, which predicts the ideal color using those three measurements taken from your skin. The algorithm goes on to determine the correct amount of each ingredient required. Then you have the mix of those ingredients. 20 minutes after, you have the perfect foundation you are dreaming of!”
Lavernos also highlighted that consumers today are much more interested that in the past about the ingredients in the products they use but also where they come from and how they are sourced and manufactured. L’Oreal now provides QR codes that provide product origin, production, manufacturing conditions, sourcing, supplier details, and the like.
Customers are also more interested in the environmental impact of the products they use. L’Oreal has established a partnership with Gjosa, a Swiss innovation and environmental company that integrates technology into everyday products to make them more environmentally friendly. The partnership has developed a multi-channel showerhead that integrates Gjosa patented In-Flow technology, that will make it possible for beauty salons to use 80% less water when washing customers’ hair. Lavernos indicated that a version for consumers to use at home is in the offing, as well.
The pandemic has pushed some consumers who had little or no experience with virtual try-ons for make-up, for example, to use the latest technology to do so. Many have enjoyed the experience so much that Lavernos believes many will continue to interact with the company virtually for try-ons even when the health crisis subsides. In 2020, more than 25% of L’Oreal’s revenue was derived via digitally via e-commerce. That represented an increase of 70% over the prior year. “Here again, there will be no way back,” said Lavernos. “Not to say that people will not come back to physical shops, but they will go to physical shops for other experiences [than in the past]. Here again, technology will play a key role for entertainment, for precision advice, for our professionals taking care of them [personally].” She believes that e-commerce sales will eventually behalf of the company’s overall sales.
Lavernos believes that her ascent to the Deputy Chief Executive Officer role at L’Oreal was aided by her background in technology. “Technology is business today,” she underscored. “My appointment in this position is really only the translation of this belief…. [technology] became fully, completely strategic, let’s say, eight years ago when we transformed into Industry 4.0, when we entered this digital shift and more and more IT came into everything. When you speak about advertising…it is tech-based today. When it comes to innovation…it is about technology. When it comes to supply chain e-commerce, it is about technology. Finance? If you are not real-time, at scale, capable [of leveraging] AI, how can you properly manage your Finance [function]?”
Therefore, Lavernos believes that her journey will be replicated many times over, as technology and digital leaders increasingly are seen as ideal candidates for the top ranks within companies. She provides a remarkable case-in-point for others to ponder and emulate.
It may seem strange to think of a technology or digital leader being responsible for aligning strategy across the enterprise. Since the inception of the CIO role, strategies were often created and then brought to them. They were not engaged in the strategic planning processes of the rest of the organization. Instead, they had to bring to life the outcomes of those strategies.
If you think about it, though, aside from the chief executive officer, only the chief financial officer and chief human resources officer has the breadth of purview comparable to a CIO or chief digital officer, and the technology and digital executives are increasingly involved in customer-facing activities in a way that the CFO and CHRO roles have not historically been.
Technology and digital leaders must recognize that they engage with the rest of the enterprise and the company’s customers, and that is rare if not unique. As such, they must leverage this advantage to a greater extent in fostering strategic alignment.
Strategic alignment means ensuring there is alignment from enterprise strategy to divisional, business unit, or functional strategy. This alignment is often misunderstood or lacking in companies, and that disconnect means wasted effort and money for the enterprise.
Further, a lack of well-articulated plans at the divisional level means the path to bringing those plans to life will be murky at best. For reasons of self-preservation and value-creation, technology and digital leaders must push for better.
Translating IT strategy from the enterprise level to the divisional level is important because it is at the divisional level where the work is done. Enterprise strategy typically calls out objectives related to revenue growth, cost efficiency, customer satisfaction, geographic expansion, product innovation and the like. It is the divisions of the company that determine how each of those will happen.
Let’s take revenue growth as an example. Growing revenue is vital to the health of a company, but each function — from sales and marketing to specific product or service areas — contributes in different yet important ways. The specifics of what each function will do needs to be formulated clearly to have teams go and find the new revenue through the various mechanisms available across the company.
Engage teams to conduct an analysis of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT). Such analyses are typically simple, easy to understand, and ensure that leaders can gather information quickly, easily and at the right level of granularity:
As you gather feedback from these SWOTs, it is important to categorize the feedback into topics like people, processes, product, brand, geography or market, finance, customers, organization or culture, competition, technology, vendors or partners, and the like. These form the vestigial versions of objectives for the enterprise or division.
Optimally, you should gather that feedback into a common framework of objectives, goals, tactics and measures.
Each objective should have a goal associated with it. This is a success metric that helps chart the path to success.
Using the same rather generic enterprise strategies, the goals might be defined as revenue growth (grow revenue by 15% in the next year), cost efficiency (grow costs at a rate 5% under revenue growth in the next year), customer satisfaction (improve customer satisfaction with our products from 70% satisfied to 80% satisfied in two years), geographic expansion (open 10 new offices in the coming year) or product innovation (introduce two, $50 million revenue products in the next year).
Try to limit the number of goals to two, as if you go for more than that, the strategy is less of a filter and is permeable to too many ideas.
Next, the digital and technology leader can brainstorm tactics with members of the enterprise or divisional team who are experts in the area noted by a given objective. As noted above, these are the various actions available to the company (or division) that help it reach the goal(s) articulated.
It is important to note that tactics should never include the name of a particular solution. The extent to which a project name or a vendor product is noted in a strategic plan renders it more important than it is. The action is one thing; the means of delivering the action are another.
You may believe that Salesforce is the solution you wish to use for customer relationship management, but better to articulate the need for CRM than to note the solution. The solution should be debated.
The tactics can be more plentiful, and during the brainstorming phase, definitely err on the side of more rather than fewer tactics. After the list is finalized, the tactics should be prioritized. The prioritization should be undertaken based on the perception of which ones are being pursued today, which ones are likely to be pursued in the near term, which will be undertaken in the medium term, which will be undertaken later, and which ones may or may not be undertaken.
Finally, a measure or measures should be defined for each tactic. For the same reason noted for the goals, try to limit them to two. For the goals and measures, remember the acronym SMART.
Our current moment has provided an opportunity for CIOs and other technology leaders to be the catalyst for their firms’ strategic evolution. These executives should take advantage of driving digital change. Otherwise, they risk digital driving them.
Peter A. High is the author of GETTING TO NIMBLE: How to Transform Your Company into a Digital Leader and President of Metis Strategy, a management and strategy consulting firm focused on the intersection of business and technology.
With all the ways digital innovation has enabled companies to remain productive during the pandemic, one of the most positive outcomes is improved collaboration across traditional business silos. In my new book, Getting to Nimble: How to Transform Your Company into a Digital Leader, I discuss how enterprises have made these silos more permeable, creating greater partnerships along the way.
Consider the following five examples and how they could apply to your digital transformation efforts.
Talented technologists are in high demand at most organizations, tasked with helping teams in other divisions figure out the digital implications of their ideas and strategize accordingly. In many cases, these ideas come from the technologists themselves. Companies that provide such “T-shaped” career paths offer an enormous advantage, developing leaders with great breadth and depth of experience. When they ascend to “chief” roles, they do so with a much clearer understanding about how value is created within the enterprise.
Agile methodology has been a boon for collaboration across the enterprise.
The traditional “waterfall” method of development involves someone from the business side (outside of IT) placing an order with the IT department. The IT team then develops this order, with little input from the business side until the project is completed months later.
In contrast, agile development includes the intended audience or user of the project in development from ideation through completion. With each iteration, the user validates value, and features are amplified or turned off accordingly. In some cases, the entire project may even be scrapped as a result of what the team learns.
DevOps blends two traditionally siloed parts of the technology and digital domain: development and operations. In a traditional project development model, developers take a project from ideation through completion, and the operations team then moves it forward. There is often a moment in the lifecycle when the project is “thrown over the wall” from development to operations (even this phrase highlights the distance and disconnects between the activities of the two groups).
DevOps instead makes delivery teams responsible for production issues and fixes, whether legacy or new, drawing them into the lifecycle earlier. Greater levels of involvement and accountability make for better work products.
The migration from a project to a product orientation is another area that benefits from greater collaboration. Internal “products” are also good examples of this – think order-to-cash, onboarding new hires, or creating a mobile customer experience.
These products potentially involve great value, and the product teams are typically cross-divisional or cross-discipline: They might include tech and digital, marketing, sales, operations, and any other division to which the product is relevant. A product leader should lead the cross-functional team, and that team should be prepared to remain intact for a longer period of time than the typical project.
An early example of this type of project orientation comes from Atticus Tysen, Chief Information and Security Officer at Intuit. When Tysen became CIO, he brought with him a product orientation, defining products for IT to drive. By developing in long-term teams, each team member was able to develop a higher level of expertise in the product area than they would have in a more traditional project structure.
Data strategy has also driven more cross-functional thinking. Done well, all strategy should invite greater collaboration across traditional silos since value is truly driven at the intersection of the disciplines. Data strategy should apply everywhere data is gathered, secured, synthesized, and analyzed – across the entire company.
Many companies have found it useful to have a leader who drives data strategy on the company’s behalf. To do this effectively, that leader (whether the CIO, the chief data officer, or another IT role) should engage leaders in other parts of the company to ensure that the data strategy is as comprehensive and useful as possible.
These are just a few areas where stronger collaboration is happening across industries and geographies. Companies that fail to take advantage of these trends risk falling behind more nimble players in their industry.
Peter A. High is the author of GETTING TO NIMBLE: How to Transform Your Company into a Digital Leader (Kogan Page, Spring 2021) and President of Metis Strategy, a management and strategy consulting firm focused on the intersection of business and technology. He has advised and interviewed many of the world’s top CIOs and leaders at multi-billion-dollar corporations like Gap, Bank of America, Adobe, Time Warner Inc., Intuit, and more.
Yasir Anwar is the Chief Technology Officer and Chief Digital Officer of Williams-Sonoma. He refers to the company as a house of brands, which include Williams-Sonoma, Williams-Sonoma Home, West Elm, Pottery Barn, Pottery Barn Teen, Pottery Barn Kids, Mark & Graham, and Rejuvenation. Technology and digital are the central nervous system of the company, Anwar notes. “We are the world’s largest digital-first, design-led and sustainable home retailer. For that, you have to bring the whole world together to serve the customer needs.”
Anwar sees the evolution of the head of technology role as key in this transformation. He notes that “traditional” CIOs have an internal operational focus. The merging of technology and digital in his title and responsibilities implies a focus on technology projects but also on outcomes. What value is being driven? “It always has to start with the customer experience,” Anwar says. “This is the merger of the technology strength, powered and coupled by customer experience, digital experiences, and the power of digital that has been unleashing in the world as we speak.”
The results speak for themselves. Williams-Sonoma has a 70% e-commerce revenue penetration, Anwar said, up from 58% prior to the pandemic. Achieving that from a technical perspective begins with a global multi-tenant platform and a modern e-commerce platform. “We are building on top of not just microservices, but micro front-end, which would allow us to have more nimble, small, modular services,” noted Anwar. This allows the company to go to market much more rapidly. The platform is used across all of the company’s brands, which gives the company an edge when it comes to innovation. The platform allows the company to test a new idea or feature on a single brand, gather data, and quickly roll it out to others if it is successful.
As with many other companies, the pandemic accelerated digital innovation. For example, Williams-Sonoma associates use a tool called Room Planner to help advise clients on what furniture fits best in which rooms. The pandemic pushed for a faster release of a customer-facing version of the tool, which enables a customer to use the measurements of a room in their house, and then fill the space with furniture from across Williams-Sonoma’s brands. This proved to be a game changer at a time when so many people focused on updating and upgrading their homes to make them more conducive to both work and personal life. The tool also provides a connection to a professional when a customer wishes to get advice or ask questions.
When asked for Williams-Sonoma’s points of differentiation, Anwar believes one of the biggest examples is the company’s in-house design. “Many other marketplaces…sell home furnishing items,” he said. “They [typically procure] those items. They’re sourcing those items from different vendors across the world, but they do not own the design of those products.” By contrast, each of the Williams-Sonoma brands have high-performing, passionate and inspirational designers. “We own and we design everything and then we work with our in-house manufacturing locations, which we have here in the U.S.,” said Anwar, “We make in America, and then we also go to our partners, wherever we need to get the quality and diversity of design manufacturing…. I don’t think there is a company that could claim that they have such a deep ownership of the design, freshness of the design, and then the quality of the design.”
Anwar and his team have focused on two key cultural pillars in their transformation. First was moving a culture of “managers managing managers” to “experts leading experts.” This entails upskilling the team dramatically to greater levels of depth of knowledge. The second was going from a focus on output to a focus on outcomes. The result has been a transformation from a traditional retailer to a true hybrid between traditional retail and retail tech. “Our business is completely running on the rails of technology,” Anwar said. “Our goal in the next few years is to [reach a point where] tech front-loads the business propulsion and growth.”
The “house of brands” approach works for Williams-Sonoma because each brand serves different phases of an individual or a family’s life. The stores, themselves, reflect those nuances. A Pottery Barn Kids will have a different look and feel from Williams-Sonoma. That said, there are many commonalities and best practices that the unified Stores team can apply across the brands. Technology reflects a similar strategy. “If you have brands which are running on different platforms, different versions, there is a ton of costs,” he said. “If you have tested something great in one brand, you cannot go live [with] another brand because there are so many nuances.” Anwar noted that at least 85% of the company’s technology stack is common for all the brands.
Each of these trends served Williams-Sonoma well, and the stock price of the company bears this out, as it has risen more than 450% since March 20, 2020, from roughly $36 per share to the current price north of $164 per share.
Anwar is proud of the degree to which the tech and digital team fostered nimbleness in the company. “The teams were ready, the infrastructure was ready, the websites were ready, the supply chain fulfillment operational teams were ready,” noted Anwar. “It is a unique situation for all [retailers]. As they say, everybody is going through the same storm, but on different types of ships.” Anwar and his team have helped Williams-Sonoma build a ship to withstand the storm, steering more readily toward opportunity and away from danger.
