The Grill: SuperValu's Wayne Shurts on 'intensely business-focused IT'

Computerworld - In April 2010, when Wayne Shurts stepped into the role of executive vice president and CIO at SuperValu, a U.S. grocery retailer and distributor whose brands include the Albertsons and Shaw's/Star Market chains, he brought skills he had honed as an IT executive at Cadbury, as well as two decades of experience in finance, marketing and sales at Nabisco.

Shurts, who has an MBA in marketing from Seton Hall University, also spent several years as head of his own consulting firm, which specialized in transformational technology strategies. He's now working to help the IT department at SuperValu better support the company's overall business.

You recently deployed Yammer to support collaboration. How did that come about? Our CEO, Craig Herkert, was the champion. Craig attended a Microsoft CEO summit in the fall of 2010, and concurrent with that we had been using Yammer's public free site; some grass-roots people got it started. Craig is very much a technology-focused CEO. He has kids, so he understands the power of social media, and he came back on fire for what social media could do for SuperValu. In nine months' time, the audience grew from a handful of people to more than 8,000 folks. It's really taken off, and it's done all those things that Craig envisioned.

Computerworld - In April 2010, when Wayne Shurts stepped into the role of executive vice president and CIO at SuperValu, a U.S. grocery retailer and distributor whose brands include the Albertsons and Shaw's/Star Market chains, he brought skills he had honed as an IT executive at Cadbury, as well as two decades of experience in finance, marketing and sales at Nabisco.

Shurts, who has an MBA in marketing from Seton Hall University, also spent several years as head of his own consulting firm, which specialized in transformational technology strategies. He's now working to help the IT department at SuperValu better support the company's overall business.

You recently deployed Yammer to support collaboration. How did that come about? Our CEO, Craig Herkert, was the champion. Craig attended a Microsoft CEO summit in the fall of 2010, and concurrent with that we had been using Yammer's public free site; some grass-roots people got it started. Craig is very much a technology-focused CEO. He has kids, so he understands the power of social media, and he came back on fire for what social media could do for SuperValu. In nine months' time, the audience grew from a handful of people to more than 8,000 folks. It's really taken off, and it's done all those things that Craig envisioned.

Tell me about some of your other key deployments and how they're improving business performance? One key thing that's about a year old now is the promotion analysis tool. It allows our managers to use analytics to model the effect of what a certain promotion will yield, to see what will deliver the best performance and margins. It's a pretty sophisticated tool that has really allowed us to get tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars out of it. That promotion tool has been a significant win for our merchants. They're doing a lot more models about what's the best promotion to run at this time of year, what prices to cut.

How do you ensure IT develops and deploys the right tools to bring business value? It's looking at what the business is trying to accomplish and how we can enable that. That's how the promotion tool was born. Our agenda starts with direct conversations with the merchandisers, the marketing folks, the retail folks. We call it "intensely business-focused IT." We've also organized IT the way the business is organized. We've embedded IT people in the business. We're trying to do IT from the business up. My direct reports report to me, but they also have a strong dotted line to their [business area] executive vice presidents.

How do you balance IT costs against the need to innovate and move forward while keeping up with maintenance in an industry known for thin profit margins? We have a multiyear ongoing cost savings initiative going on here in IT. We're looking for cost savings, looking for ways to do what we do today cheaper. The good news is technology gets cheaper over time. And new technology, like the cloud, when you deploy it right, can be done the same or better or cheaper. And with this intensely business-focused IT, we use technology in a way that can get the job done in a cost-effective way.

How do you define agility within an IT organization? I would define it as speed, and it's something that IT traditionally hasn't been good at -- bringing about quick solutions in a quick time frame. How can we work with the business and turn around new capabilities, functions, systems in a very fast time frame? I'm talking about three weeks or three months -- not 18 months or three years, like IT normally works.

Agility requires a new way of thinking and working, both for IT and business. You absolutely have to start with speed in mind, and move from designing systems in conference rooms to working on the store floor or the warehouse floor, working directly with the end users, rapidly developing prototypes, iterating, finding out what works and just developing in a completely different fashion, testing as you go.

How do you balance agility with other requirements -- such as guaranteeing that systems do what they're supposed to do, security needs, usability and so on? There are two things that we found, two approaches we're taking. We set folks off to begin doing the prototype and iterations with the business, have them start using it, changing it days later. That's a very agile, interactive process. We end up with something we're using and that's solving a problem, and that's great. But you might look at that product at the end of the day and say, "It's wonderful, we got it done fast," but it's not really scalable to 4,000 stores. So we bring in folks who look at it and say, "How do we make it industrial strength?"

The other thing we've found is that speed and quality are complementary. By working with the business to develop an application, we get a much greater quality application because it's grown up through real-life use, [not] where we sit in the conference room and envision the way it should work and develop it over a long period of time.

If the lines continue to blur in the future, will the CIO role become obsolete? There will always be a need for a CIO or a role like that. I actually think the lines are blurring because technology is becoming more ubiquitous, but we still need an enterprise view to bring things together.

— Interview by Computerworld contributing writer Mary K. Pratt (marykpratt@verizon.net)

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