Qurate Retail CIO & CEO Discuss How to Break Down the IT-Business Divide

Few retailers can succeed without constantly infusing the latest technology into their strategies. To achieve this, the outmoded divide between “IT” and “the business” must be replaced with a seamlessly integrated partnership – and building this partnership takes time and effort.

Karen Etzkorn, CIO of Qurate Retail Group, and Mike George, President and CEO of Qurate Retail, Inc., shared their insights on how to create this collaboration at NRF Retail Converge 2021, a virtual five-day industry event held in late June. Their session was moderated by Rob Schmults, an Executive Board Member at the private equity firm MidOcean Partners.

Step one is to set aside traditional ways of working, in which merchandising, marketing, or another team simply hands requirements to IT. A better approach, Mike said, is to bring everyone together, early in the strategic dialog, to talk about where the company needs to go and the role of technology in that journey. Mike called this “moving the discussion upstream,” and it is one reason that Karen is an integral member of Qurate Retail Group’s executive leadership team.

“That mindset shift creates a really different level of engagement,” Mike said. “Technology experts are naturally great problem solvers and can help take us to new heights as they think differently about the problems we’re trying to address.”

At Qurate Retail Group, Mike said, Karen and her team have helped the company shift its view of technology from a series of “projects” focused on tools to a set of “products” organized around how the company creates value, with each product led by a cross-functional team. This could mean, for example, grouping all technology related to attracting new customers into one initiative, jointly led by IT, marketing, merchandising, and commerce operations.

This agile approach allows the technology team to engage more deeply with their colleagues, which helps the business maximize its technology resources and achieve goals faster, Karen said.

“We’re used to being in a paradigm of saying, ‘What is it you want? I’ll write it down, then I’ll go and figure it out,’” she said. “Now, we’re thinking about the product, and the capabilities and the vision of that product, and tying that back to the business’s strategic objectives.”

For this collaboration to work, technology team members need a deep understanding of the business, and other teams must proactively welcome the tech team to strategic discussions as a business partner.

“As technology is changing and as fast as we’re changing, this isn’t just a change in how technology works,” Karen said. “It’s also a change in how the business engages with us – how we engage together and how we become one team.”

Technology is intrinsically future focused, Mike noted, so technology teams tend to be on the leading edge of organizational designs that foster collaboration. Insights developed within the technology team can be valuable for the whole organization.

“We all need to think differently about skill sets and cultural structures,” Mike said. “Having Karen at the table, able to articulate where we’re trying to go in the technology organization, helps inform the rest of us as to how we need to evolve the rest of the company.”

To watch Karen and Mike’s conversation at NRF Retail Converge, click here.