Customer Service: Job One for McCormick & Schmick's IT Department
McCormick and Schmick's Seafood Restaurants' seven-person IT staff supports 96 dining establishments in the U.S. and Canada and a core user group of 700 employees. In this latest Hiring Manager interview, McCormick & Schmick's Vice President of Information Technology Daniel Cunningham discusses how his small team supports the chain, his criteria for hiring IT staff, and why he'll never hire someone who criticizes end-users during a job interview.
Fri, April 24, 2009
CIO — Daniel Cunningham joined McCormick & Schmick's Seafood Restaurants Inc. as its director of financial systems in 2005—a particularly hectic and exciting time for the restaurant chain. It was expanding rapidly across the U.S., had recently gone public (it's listed on the NASDAQ under MSSR) and was racing to become Sarbanes-Oxley compliant.
With so much activity inside the company, Cunningham's role evolved to encompass IT management, and he was named director of information technology. Cunningham was charged with deploying new technology that would improve the McCormick & Schmick's financial reporting and with implementing new business process that would maintain the company's efficiency as it grew.
Today, McCormick & Schmick's, like many businesses, is being hit hard by the recession. The restaurant posted a $69 million loss for its fiscal year 2008, and its outlook for 2009 is very conservative.
Though the company's fortunes have shifted dramatically from 2005, Cunningham's mandate hasn't changed much: He's still working on process improvements, but now he's more focused on finding ways to support McCormick & Schmick's 96 restaurants and a core user group of 700 employees with existing technology and with his six person staff.
You read that right: Six IT professionals (plus Cunningham) make up McCormick & Schmick's IT department. There's a senior manager of restaurant systems, a supervisor of architecture administration, a network analyst who also does PC technician work and some network administration, a database administrator who also does programming, and two point of sales analysts.
As the recession forces IT organizations across the country to do more with less, small IT shops like McCormick and Schmick's offer examples of how to leverage limited resources. For instance, Cunningham says using software as a service applications (SaaS) supported by third parties frees up his IT staff to work on other priorities.
Small IT shops like Cunningham's also often seek IT professionals who can wear different hats. When Cunningham has an open position, he looks for versatile candidates with myriad skills who are also customer-focused. Anyone who complains about clueless end-users is not a fit for his IT organization.
Cunningham spoke with The Alexander Group's Amanda Brady about his criteria for hiring IT staff and why he doesn't always trust his gut when making hiring decisions.
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Amanda Brady: How do you support a national restaurant chain with such a small IT staff?
Daniel Cunningham: One of the ways we get away with a smaller team is by using some hosted applications. Our point of sale and back office systems are both hosted. We divide support amongst ourselves and a variety of [vendor] partners.
