657: Gurmeet and Gary join Metis Strategy’s Mike Bertha on the topic of building resilient digital supply chains. Gurmeet provides his perspective on the role of data in supply chains and how ecosystems fit into making them more resilient. Gary describes what role the CIO plays and how the company is exploring new business models that could fundamentally change the way supply chains operate.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | Android | Podcast Index | Deezer | Youtube Music | RSS | More
644: Carman discusses the restructuring of IT’s vision to provide a better customer experience for Dollar General. Carman shares what this vision for IT looks like and how he has used it to develop scale at the company. He also goes over Dollar General’s digital strategy and app-based technologies to serve its customers. Finally, Carman gives his perspective on how modernization and advancements in technology have provided him a better toolkit for finding efficiencies, how his legal background has informed his view as CIO, and what tech trends are on his radar for the future.
642: In this interview, Seemantini discusses how she is driving innovation at the company and using technology to be a differentiator among competing retailers. Seemantini describes her expansive purview overseeing various functions at the company and how those functions ultimately fit together. She also explains the evolution of data products at Lowe’s, pre-pandemic efforts to foster resilience, as well the idea of “spatial commerce” and the innovations that come along with it to meet changing customer needs.
637: Vlad covers the athlete and teammate-centered strategy at the company. Vlad begins with an explanation of his purview as CTO of the sports retailer and provides background on the company’s strategy focusing on the distinction between the inward and outward-facing aspects. He describes the ways his experience as a professional athlete has shaped his perspective in his role, weaved the teammate mentality into the DNA of the organization, and influenced the way he focuses on the customer and employee experience. Finally, Vlad talks about how he curates his unique ecosystem of experts to improve the athlete experience and the trends in technology that will continue to evolve the sports industry.
627: In this interview, Mike discusses his beginnings at the company and what drew him to the US-based company. He focuses on the company’s extraordinary digital transformation, the sanctity of data and forming a data strategy, and the cultural change required to bring Target’s IT organization to the forefront of the customer experience. Mike shares how he leads his team in “ruthless prioritization” and the ways in which Target acts as a talent factory developing the next generation of CIOs.
_____________________________________
This episode is sponsored by Transmit Security.
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.
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.
560: In this interview, Hubert Joly, former Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Best Buy, discusses his personal philosophy on the goal of a business and why he viewed Best Buy as being more than just a technology retailer. Hubert goes on to share insight from his book such as how he identified weaknesses in Best Buy’s strategy and transformed the company to focus on collaboration with suppliers, alignment of interests of all stakeholders, and what he calls “human magic”.
550: Melanie Kalmar, the CIO & CDO of Dow, and Shamim Mohammad, the chief information & technology officer of CarMax both have experience modernizing large organizations. In this interview, Melanie discusses Dow’s adoption of agile and DevOps practices, offers insight into how she has reoriented IT around service delivery, and gives her take on how to innovate at scale. Meanwhile, Shamim discusses CarMax’s shift from a project orientation to a product orientation and why the traditional way of delivering IT projects does not work anymore. We also discuss how transforming to a nimbler organization has helped CarMax during the pandemic, among a variety of other topics.
533: GAP chief information officer and head of strategy Sally Gilligan discusses
Among a variety of other topics.
516: Copart’s CTO & SVP of Technology Rama Prasad discusses:
