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Wal-Mart: IT Inside the World's Biggest Company

By Abbie Lundberg

July 01, 2002 — CIO — Wal-Mart is big. To understand just how big, consider that on Nov. 23, 2001, the 40-year-old retailer sold more than $1.25 billion worth of goods in a single day. The company has 4,457 stores, 30,000 suppliers, annual sales of more than $217 billion?and one information system. According to CIO Kevin Turner, running centralized IS with homegrown, common-source code gives Wal-Mart a competitive advantage and helps the company maintain one of the lowest expense structures in retail.

Turner stepped into the top CIO spot two and a half years ago at age 34, when former CIO Randy Mott departed for Dell. Turner had served as Mott’s second in command, and prior to that he ran application development as Wal-Mart’s youngest corporate officer

(29 years old). In 1997, Turner became the first recipient of the Sam M. Walton Entrepreneur of the Year award, a very high honor at the company. But when asked about his accomplishments, this CIO talks primarily about the capabilities and accomplishments of the Wal-Mart IS team, the vision of its CEOs past and present, and how blessed (his word) he is to work with such a remarkable group of people and for a company like Wal-Mart.

CIO Editor in Chief Abbie Lundberg talked with Turner this spring about Wal-Mart’s competitive position, IS strategy, development methodology and the importance of security for a just-in-time company in a post-9/11 world.


CIO: Wal-Mart’s the largest company in the world now. Has that changed your priorities?
Kevin Turner: You know, we don’t talk a lot at Wal-Mart about being the largest company in the world. [Founder] Sam Walton never had a goal of being the largest company in the world, nor did [previous CEO] David Glass or [current CEO] Lee Scott. What we do talk about is being the best company in the world. And having something called the divine discontent, which says that you’ll never be satisfied with where you’re at or where you’re going, and that you can always improve. Striving for excellence is one of our three core beliefs. Sam died in 1992, and everything in the company in the last 10 years has changed except for three things: Have respect for the individual, practice excellent customer service and strive for excellence in all that we do. In that third core belief, which is very strategic for us, is that divine discontent.


You also have three basic philosophies behind your IS strategy. Tell us about that.
The first philosophy is to run a centralized information system for our operations all over the world, and we run that from Arkansas. The second is to have common systems and common platforms. The third is to be merchants first and technologists second.

 

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