Wal-Mart Executive VP and CIO Linda Dillman says the retailer takes “a development approach” to implementing large-scale IT initiatives.
With Wal-Mart being centralized, it has only one IT group for the entire company. Wal-Mart’s IT costs are made part of the company’s general overhead instead of the responsibility of separate business units, Dillman said. “Each business unit has a manager on the team so that benefits and drawbacks can be evaluated realistically by unit.”
Global initiatives are the primary focus though, Dillman said. “We dont believe anyone is a good enough designer to get any project absolutely perfect from the very first. So we learn a lot — and tweak accordingly along the way — by breaking large projects into smaller deliverables.”
Read the entire CIO Today story here.