"The 90's and early 2000's were all about efficient supply chain," she says. "Having an efficient supply chain is now table stakes. Now it's about providing near real-time information on what's selling and what's not. Every customer trip becomes precious."

Does this business intelligence desire sound familiar? Read on for a look at how Jewett's team is pulling it off in a cost-conscious environment.

Four Strategic Goals for Family Dollar’s IT System

Family Dollar, a $6.8 billion company founded in 1959 and based in North Carolina, is the kind of place you might go to pick up a case of Diet Coke and some chips, and walk out with those items plus a paper tablecloth and some Hanes socks.

The store carries all name-brand merchandise, with most items ringing up at less than $5. The typical store has 6 to 8 employees, 2 to 3 cash registers, and 7,000 to 9,000 square feet of floor space. That store has to compete with other discount stores, supermarkets and drug stores. "In retail, there's been a blending of channels," says Jewett. "You can buy toothpaste at 7-11, Walgreens or Family Dollar."

Even the mighty Wal-Mart is struggling to convince consumers that it's the place for these kinds of items. But Family Dollar is committed to an aggressive growth clip: In the five years that Jewett has been there as CIO, the company has added 250 to 500 stores per year; it added about 300 last year.

When Jewett came on board, he learned the business side had four strategic goals that IT needed to help support: expanding in existing urban markets and improving store operations there; expanding the food assortment in locations carrying groceries; expanding the payment types accepted to include options such as food stamps and credit cards; and continuing to increase the number of stores.

"We birthed the store of the future project because we didn't believe our existing technologies were necessarily going to drive those goals," Jewett says.

The “Store of the Future” Template

The "store of the future" for Family Dollar—a technology vision that's been rolled out to about 750 stores so far and will hit another 1,500 in fiscal 2008—looks dramatically different than from those in the past. The old stores were using a color-coded paper folder system for tracking store management activities and using back-of-store PCs running DOS with dial-up lines, Jewett notes. Good old three-ring binders were plentiful for requirements like training and hiring, he says.