Retail voices: Carole Kingsbury on the challenges of tech leadership
Author: Jack Fitzgerald, Business Development Director, Zühlke
It’s 2024, and retail tech leaders find themselves faced with a raft of challenges from all angles.
According to Carole Kingsbury, ex-Technology Director at Ted Baker, the most pressing are:
- Simplifying the technology estate
- Legacy modernisation and completing the cloud migration journey
- Siloed ways of working
- A lack of ownership for data (governance and stewardship)
In short, the problems that have persisted for over a decade in one form or another! As Carole commented, it’s easy to see this seeming lack of progress as somewhat depressing.
She puts this down to there often being too much focus on short-term thinking and a lack of bravery when it comes to technology. Often, leaders seem to rely too heavily on what worked in their previous role and “comfort zone thinking”, making safe decisions even if safe is perhaps not in the best interest of the business.
A lack of strong business vision can also leave the door open for the tech industry sales machines, with retailers seemingly easily distracted with products that are often marketed as panaceas. A lack of good due diligence and/or lack of ability to articulate the business problem and objectives can lead to disappointment. The promised results from the sales process end up not being realised as expected when the technology lands or, where the work that needs to be undertaken is far harder and far more complex than first anticipated, resulting in soaring costs, longer implementation timelines, or reduced capability.
The latter point is perhaps exemplified by cloud migration projects, where it is not uncommon to see a migration stall or slow down significantly once the “easy to move” applications have been done, and reality starts to bite as core applications need to be moved and the impacts and risk of the remaining activity dawns. Given the “Frankenstein” nature of many technology landscapes, detailed technical planning and assessment of business impacts and mitigation is key to ensuring such events can be managed effectively and completed as efficiently as possible with least risk to the business.
Why it’s important to cultivate a culture of bravery
Despite the many challenges Carole believes there is plenty of room for optimism by looking at one such force majeure event in recent memory. A lack of bravery certainly wasn’t the case during the COVID-19 pandemic, when tough but necessary decisions were made to pivot to new business models and innovate in order to keep trading. She says that “this period saw more free thinking with decisions being made far more swiftly than under normal operating conditions”, she wonders whether perhaps we should “think more as we did during the pandemic and cultivate a culture of bravery outside of force majeure conditions and tackle the harder to do changes more actively accepting that it won’t be perfect but that it is at least forward movement and progress.”
The frequent deprioritisation of legacy modernisation is a good example of reducing forward movement in an organisation—it is a barrier to implementing new technology as it often requires integration back into legacy systems and is also a barrier to the use of the legacy system itself as it becomes slow, cumbersome, and more recent versions of the software provider richer and more relevant functionality.
The legacy gap exists in many companies due to budget constraints—legacy systems replacement or replatforming is often more complex, more time consuming and more costly than implementing new technology—as such the return on investment is often not attractive—high cost/low return. Arguably however, persisting this “vegetative” legacy (e)state until there is a force majeure event or trigger often leads to a less than optimal implementation from both a technical and business change perspective.
Retailers need to better plan how to address long-standing legacy technology issues and take approaches that may be slower overall (smaller changes with more iterations), but which will ultimately enable change to be landed effectively.
Who can really help retailers deliver on their digital transformation ambitions?
If businesses can be braver and more focused on the reality of running complex business and technology landscapes, there is also a role here for technology vendors and service providers to better support retailers.
Carole’s view is that “what we always need is someone on our side who understands the industry in general terms as well as our particular business, its problems, challenges, and opportunities and how the tech either complements or detracts from those. Tech and operational teams will always have a view from their internal perspective or retail peers, but tech vendors and service providers can offer a far broader view that is invaluable.”
Most technology vendors know their product inside out but don’t always have a broader context of the industry, and so can often revert to overselling features. Traditional consultants may know the retail business, but without being hands-on with the tech they can only sell a strategy, or a theory does not deliver. The “Unicorn” partner is one that knows the retail space well (or is prepared to and able to learn at warp speed, who both understands and cares about your business outcomes, who actively uses tech know-how to solve complex problems, and who comprehends fully the human impact of change on an organisation. Thinkers and doers, who really listen to the problem, who know when they are (or aren’t) a good fit, and who identify workable solutions to support delivery of business outcomes.
As Carole summarises: “The best partners are retail experts who are also tech experts and who understand your business and what you’re trying to achieve—people who will run into burning buildings (metaphorically), who will support you, challenge you and work shoulder-to-shoulder with you to ensure your objectives are achieved.”
