Who's Mining the Store?
In the first of a series of "View from the Top" interviews, 7-Eleven President and CEO James Keyes says the role of IT is to help the company sell more stuff by creatively using point-of-sale data.
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So this was not an issue of internal commitment, then?
No. One of the advantages of being chief executive is I can get all the internal commitment that I want. [Laughs] The mistake I made was that I left our IT group out of the project for too long. I let the merchandising department run the project at the beginning because they were behind the product concept. But if I had it to do over again, I would have brought some merchandising people into IT and have the project originate from IT.
If you could change one thing about IT at 7-Eleven today, what would it be?
Here's the ongoing challenge—it's the same one I give my merchandisers: The opportunities for change are never ending. The IT department—just like the merchandise department—tends to get comfortable with the project that they have on the table. Achieving the right balance between finishing what we've got versus keeping an eye on new and better technology is the challenge.
Right now, RFID is coming down the road. There's a tendency for IT groups to look at something like RFID in the [obvious] sense: Oh, that's a supply chain opportunity; we can track inventory. Well, there's also another element of RFID that makes it much more able to serve the customer. Imagine every food item with RFID technology on the label so that as you bring it to the microwave or convection oven, the product tells the oven how long to cook. These are things that you can do with RFID to be able to satisfy the customer. So getting our technology folks to think like retailers so that they're looking at emerging technologies in the 7-Eleven way—to better satisfy the customer—that's probably the greatest challenge.
How have you told them to address that challenge?
We are making them part of the retailing team. In the ideal world, the IT group will not be seen as an IT group, they will be seen as intermixed within our organization so that it's hard to tell the IT person from the retailer. Now that's—like I said—in the ideal world. [Laughs] We're evolving toward that.
The way I'm trying to do it is by rotating people from the business into IT. We tried doing it the other way, with IT people moving into the business, but it didn't work. Inevitably, the business units wanted to go off and start their own projects, and we would wind up with two different IT departments essentially competing with each other. It works much better to bring the businesspeople into IT and then send them back. It leads to better integration between the two groups.
