[00:00:00] Welcome to Unpacking the Digital Shelf, where we explore brand manufacturing in the digital age.
[00:00:16] Hi everyone, Lauren Livak Gilbert here from the Digital Shelf Institute. Welcome to our first ever crossover podcast with the eCommerce Brain Trust. I joined hosts Jordan Ripley and Julie Spear from Acadia as we chatted with Jon Harding, CIO of Conair, about the latest DSI research report. We dug into how IT and the rest of the business need to collaborate to see success in 2025. Enjoy!
[00:00:43] Hello and welcome to the eCommerce Brain Trust podcast. I'm Julie Spear, Head of Retail Marketplace Services at Acadia alongside my co-host Jordan Ripley, Director of Retail Operations. And today we are joined by a couple of great guests. We have Lauren Livak Gilbert, the Executive Director of the Digital Shelf Institute, and Jon Harding, SVP and Global CIO for Conair.
[00:01:06] They'll be sharing some of the key takeaways from the report they released last month with Micmac, that's a guide to managing technology change across the business, and specifically how to leverage IT teams to accomplish transformational growth. So without further ado, welcome Lauren and Jon. It's great to have you here. Thank you, Julie. It's great to be here. Thanks for having us. I'm so glad to be back. Nice to see you both. Likewise. Yes, it's great to have you as a return guest, Lauren and Jon.
[00:01:35] First time, long time listener, I'm sure, first time caller, but... Great to have you both here. Well, we'll go ahead and just get started because there's a lot of heft to the report that you shared. And so we'll just dig right in. One of the things that this report does really well is kind of challenge the idea that IT only matters when something breaks. It's more than that moment when my control alt delete doesn't affect change.
[00:02:02] The leaders you highlight frame IT as both the nervous system of a business and the real driver of growth. Do you think IT has always played a role, like that kind of a role and we're just now recognizing it? Or has its function actually evolved as areas like sales and marketing relied more on tech? I would say this is always sort of being true or at least from the IT leadership perspective. We like to believe it was true. And we've definitely over the years,
[00:02:32] striving to be supportive of the commercial side of the business, particularly in consumer products companies. But it is also true that I think with the advent of digital and so much technology innovation in the last 10 years, it really has become a high priority for us to focus on, on the commercial side of the business, as well as the traditional back office functions like finance and supply chain and manufacturing.
[00:03:02] I also would say that just digital commerce in general, like you need technology to be able to do it successfully. It doesn't happen without it. Exactly, exactly. But like, if you think about like in-store shopping and like, yes, you had a technology for planogramming and for pricing and things like that, but you probably have the same technology that everybody else used. Now, if you're in digital commerce, you might have 15 different pieces of technology to enable you to just do your job well.
[00:03:31] So there's more tools, there's more things that need to be vetted. It needs to make sure all those things integrate into the business. So there's just so much more that you need on the digital commerce side to be successful. And so that's what I've seen the connection between IT really need to strengthen, but historically you didn't have it, right? So it's a big change. And if you haven't built that relationship, you need to begin to do that. That brings up a good point.
[00:03:59] And maybe this is a question for, I mean, certainly a question for John, which is, it sounds like, you know, the complexity in terms of your stack has increased over time, you know, based on Lauren's point there. But presumably the technology has also gotten better. At least that would be my hope over time, that like its ability to integrate and interface with each other has improved.
[00:04:18] So it's, it's like the CIO's role in that, like it's gotten more complex, but also more gratifying over time as, as more of the business becomes technology dependent, or it's just gotten more complex. So, like, where do you see that?
[00:04:33] It's definitely more gratifying because we're all in the business as IT leaders inside consumer products companies to provide great business outcomes and great return on the investment in tech, drive business growth. All of that is obviously very, can be more directly attributable sometimes to commercially focused applications, whether they're digital commerce or some kind of sales enablement systems.
[00:05:03] So I think it's definitely got more gratifying. I think you're right that while the technology has improved, the scope has definitely broadened that corporate IT groups now need to address inside any kind of consumer products, retail or manufacturing corporation. So for that reason, the jobs definitely got bigger, maybe not exactly scaled in terms of difficulty, but it's definitely more difficult than it was just because of the greatest scale.
[00:05:31] And yes, technologies do integrate, but again, there's a, you know, there's a lot of best of breed solutions out there, which for very valid reasons, one could buy into at different times. And then you always have the integration challenge that never goes away in my experience. Right. And that brings up another point, which is like the nervous system component of information technology that Julie brought up previously.
[00:05:59] It seems like it seems like the CIO role is always going to be a highly cross-functional one where you're having to understand a lot of different elements of the business. And one of the quotes that I really liked from this report was, you know, when the CIO sells an idea, that's an uphill climb. But when you can bring in other leaders to really empower that conversation and lead the ask, that's where change often happens and you get through things a lot faster. So this is the desire of IT.
[00:06:26] I think a lot of the functional business leaders would also want it to work this way. So I love your perspective of for those people that sit in a CMO position or a VP of e-com or something like that, and they know they want to bring this project to fruition with the help of IT leadership. Like, how do they best involve you in that planning process? What does that look like in an ideal world? I think in an ideal world, it's very, very much a collaborative partnership.
[00:06:54] In some cases, I like to think of IT as a catalyst where, you know, I've been to marketing peers and said, hey, here's an idea, you know, I picked up at something. Maybe it was the Digital Shelf Institute, whatever. I picked up some idea here and perhaps it's relevant to us. But rather than come and say, hey, here's a project, you better assign people to it.
[00:07:16] It's much more important to just suggest it and say, look, you know, we can provide from the IT side some level of corporate funding for this. We can also provide technology vendor management, but we're not going to dictate what the solution is. We want to collaborate and figure out what's the right solution that fits our particular needs, especially our particular marketing team's needs.
[00:07:45] You know, I've had, long ago, battles about with marketing teams about is this the right technology or not? And in my experience, letting them pick the solution is usually 60% of the time makes it a much quicker win than coming and saying, hey, we're going to do this. Here's the solution. I remember in some of the interviews we were doing for the report, a lot of the people we interviewed from IT were saying, like, they don't want to say no.
[00:08:14] Like, they're not trying to say no, but they have a more informed understanding of the technology, of the integrations, of even technology that already exists. Maybe we can do this with something that's already happening. So I think both sides need to come in with the best intentions, right? Like, marketing comes in and understands. IT doesn't want to say no. IT comes in and understands, like, marketing has this need and I need to fix it.
[00:08:41] But I think that's the best way of coming into this conversation where previously, I think everybody kind of had their guard up a little bit. We definitely had their guard up. I agree. 20 years ago, mom would go to meetings and there would be a lot of standoff around things. Or marketing would have spent money and bought something and then they were stuck. Reluctantly called us in or equally, well, we came with something, pushed it, and it never got traction.
[00:09:08] So, but the key to avoiding that is getting involved together as early as possible and not talk about technology solutions. Talk about what is the business need and the expected outcome. And to operate from that place of, we always call it here at Acadia, MRI, the most reasonable interpretation.
[00:09:28] Come from a place that both sides are operating from a place of reason and from a place of collaboration instead of confrontation or obstruction or whatever negative connotation. It's not that. It's knowledge gaps on both sides that need to be closed.
[00:09:46] Once you get that initial collaboration that hopefully takes place at the start of the process, there's also that need to actually go through the planning and implementation process where I feel like a lot of these can, you know, everyone's excited at the start. And then when the rubber hits the road, then all of a sudden these obstacles come up that you didn't foresee or, you know, there's politics coming to play or all those things that can sort of derail a project that has the best intentions from the start.
[00:10:11] One of the recommendations in this report is, you know, moving from a situation where we do all of our planning for technology in one big annual planning session and we march against that for the entire year. And then we come back in a year and we say, well, did we do any of this? And it wasn't successful, right? And instead recommends like a more nimble cadence where you're doing this perhaps quarterly.
[00:10:32] And so I'm just wondering, like, is this sort of like taking the sort of lean methodology and applying that into this application where I know I need to find things that I can prototype early and bring that to IT? Or how do you actually see this happen in practice where I can, you know, do that sort of nimble planning? Yeah. What does that look like? The real focus on planning, and this is not just tech planning, like think retail media planning, think content planning, like new product launches.
[00:11:03] Everything changes so quickly, you cannot plan for a year. So you just need to be more nimble and you need to have more ability to flex. And I think that challenges the infrastructure of businesses that exist today, especially large CPG who have done the same thing the same way for hundreds of years. So I think about this as a fundamental shift for organizations to say, we know what we know now, and we know that's going to change.
[00:11:33] So how can we build processes cross-functionally, including IT, commercial, finance, so they're included in the conversation, and revisit it, whether that's quarterly, whether that's biannually. I know some people that were a part of this research actually did it on a monthly basis to really check, like, hey, are we prioritizing things appropriately? Does it have a very clear business value? And is this where we should be spending our time?
[00:11:59] So it does take on the agile mindset a bit, but it's more to say, this is the industry we're in. This is how it works. This is how we function. So we need to change our processes to be able to match that. Yeah, I would very much agree with that.
[00:12:14] In fact, last year we got into a cadence of meeting biweekly around our direct-to-consumer websites because there was so much changing business-wise, promotions-wise, and so on, that marketing, that we needed to respond to from a web development perspective. So, yeah, I definitely, I also think that, to the point made earlier, that it's very important to have quick wins.
[00:12:39] You can't, like, do your classic waterfall project where you spend six months planning and nobody in marketing sees anything because everybody's thought mindset has moved on by the time you come back and say, right, here's the plan. So I think quick wins, the advent of software as a service, what, 10 years ago has made this so much easier, where if you can find something that's even a 75% fit to what you expect, it's worth trying it.
[00:13:06] Like, particularly in some kind of free-of-charge proof of concept facilitated by a vendor. That way you can actually be seen to produce something, even if it's a throwaway prototype. So I very much support this being a much more agile and iterative process.
[00:13:25] And I think John really pinpoints on something that's super important, and it's the fact that IT doesn't naturally market themselves and their quick wins, but marketing does because that is their job, right? Like, they are marketers, right? So they market themselves internally, and they talk about all the things that they've done.
[00:13:45] But this is a muscle that IT really needs to lean into as well because, unfortunately, like we said in the beginning, they sometimes only get called if something goes wrong. But they do a lot of amazing things that enable the business today. So one best practice from the report that I really loved is there was a monthly newsletter that went out from the IT team to say, hey, this is a new technology we implemented. Here's the time that we saved. Here's the collaboration we did with the commercial side of the business.
[00:14:13] So it's not that IT isn't making an impact. It's just that they are not naturally marketers. And so that muscle can help them evolve inside the organization and break down that stereotype that really enables and showcases all the value that they're driving and can make that friction a little bit less. That's such a great call out for something that is so often so behind the scenes and working quietly away. Like, you got to merchandise yourself. Merchandise your wins along the way.
[00:14:42] It's a great call out. One of the lines that kind of stood out to me in the report, which seemed to might test that MRI assertion, is that IT often deprioritizes commerce or marketing needs. I'm curious why you think that is. It could tie back to kind of the concept of it's not broken, don't fix it. Where something like if you have an order management issue, there's a clear need and there's clear return, clear ROI.
[00:15:11] But when you think about projects like improving a CRM or lifecycle marketing, you can't really quantify that up front. You have to implement and maybe see the value after a period of testing. Is that kind of a fair take on why these initiatives could get pushed down the list? Obviously, I don't necessarily recognize it. No, I'm kidding. So, yes.
[00:15:32] So, obviously, we strive very hard not to deprioritize the communications because there's often a direct correlation to great business outcomes. The challenger, you know, frequently is resource bottlenecks. There's only so much that can be done. And I think sometimes the back office projects, whether it's finance changes, especially your supply chain changes or manufacturing, sort of have to be done for external compliance reasons.
[00:16:00] You know, if somebody surfaces, heaven forbid, with some kind of audit report highlighting some kind of gap, then it's very hard to say, hey, we'll get to that, you know, in nine months' time when we finish this, you know, great CRM that we're working on with marketing. It's very difficult, particularly, you know, in any corporation to say, well, there's an issue, a compliance issue of any sort that we aren't addressing. So, I think that often marketing issues, unfortunately, lack those kind of teeth.
[00:16:30] But I do think that this situation has improved as the technology has got better, as Jordan alluded to earlier, and there's more availability of solutions that sort of not plug and play, I hasten to add, but easier to implement. And initiatives are no longer as long as they were for the multi-year CRM projects. One hopes a thing of the past now.
[00:16:58] I also think, to my point earlier, like, you might need 15 different bases of technology to be able to do digital commerce correctly. And that can be challenging. And if it's not clear in the planning process or the expectation is not set that you need those things, that can be really hard to fit in on the fly.
[00:17:16] But what I think can really help from the commerce team's perspective when working with IT and with finance is really looking at your entire portfolio and prioritizing where you're spending your time and where the bang for your buck from a SKU perspective makes sense. So 20% of the SKUs drive 80% of the profit, right? So how are you focusing on that?
[00:17:41] Driving a clear business value with the technology that you're asking the IT team to support and to implement. And are those things matched? And then building out like a crawl, walk, run type of framework for your technology to say, like, hey, if we do this, we are meeting the top SKUs that we have. If we do this, it's kind of the second tier. If we do this, it's the third tier.
[00:18:01] So I also think there needs to be a communication from the commerce team side to be super clear about why they need this and what it's going to drive with business value, but also with just clarity on how it affects the overall portfolio, knowing that they're going to continue to ask for more tech needs because of the changing in the industry.
[00:18:22] It brings up a good point, which is like, you know, in traditional software development companies, you would have somebody that sits in sort of a product manager or product owner role that helps rationalize the needs of the business with the actual, you know, development priorities. But your point there, Lauren, about like, you know, I as the business owner have to understand what is the 80-20 that's achievable from the IT department and that could then, you know, meet me halfway and start to show those early wins.
[00:18:51] And you outline a few different instances of the way that those two organizations can come together, both IT and the sort of functional area of the business, whether that's marketing or what have you. There was shared service, direct IT business partners, the IT businesses embedded and partners embedded in the business or the sort of project management office. We don't have time to get into each of those in great detail, but I do want to understand, you know, granted, no, no, I think single solution fits all use cases.
[00:19:18] But if you were to build this from scratch, do you find that one of these ways of working generally is most effective for, say, a commerce organization and an IT organization to collaborate ongoing? I think it's more of what are the common threads that makes sense because every organization is so different. And I think one of my favorite quotes from the report that I think is the overarching common thread, it's not IT versus the business.
[00:19:46] It's IT and the rest of the business because IT is the business, right? So whatever structure you have, you can't pit IT as this separate entity. They are a part of the broader business. So I think when you're looking at all of these different structures, one of the common themes is that you have someone in the rest of the business owning it, who's collaborating with someone in IT and they're in lockstep and they are communicating throughout the process.
[00:20:14] So regardless of if you have shared services or you have a project management office, there has to be that clear ownership from both of the functions and they need to be in constant communication in order for any of this to be successful.
[00:20:55] So that's what I would say. Overarching kind of planning process. Absolutely. And it resonates with me about IT and the rest of the business. Finance don't talk about finance in the business. HR don't talk about it. I think IT, we've done ourselves over the years a disservice constantly trying to, saying these things and hence appearing some different tribe.
[00:21:19] And I think to that point about the two people aligned, I increasingly like the product management model, particularly around commerce especially. So especially when it's website developed. I think a product management model involving folks from the different disciplines, including IT in a product management structure is very powerful there. I think you also do need the PMO, the program management office as well, to try and balance those shared resources.
[00:21:47] Because even if you've got product management on the website, if you need a change in the back office or the management system, if it's, let's say, it's SAP, you need somebody involved from the SAP team and they inevitably are pulled various ways, which is where the PMO can help. I think there's a lot of differing models one can use within the same organization, depending on exactly what it is that you're trying to achieve.
[00:22:12] And I also think another thing to add to what John just said is, you also have to be metrics against the same thing, right? Like if the IT team is measured against, I don't know, the efficiency of something and then marketing is measured on sales, obviously they're going to be worried about different things, right? And that goes for IT, that goes for finance, that goes for legal, sales, marketing. Everybody needs to be on the same playing field so you're not working in silos against each other.
[00:22:42] And I think specifically with IT, I haven't really seen that come together quite yet. But if IT is not successful, the rest of the business is not successful. Marketing is not successful. If marketing is not successful, then IT didn't do their job, right? So they are interconnected. So how can you find real accountability in that? Right, absolutely. And I think that's where the more collaboration there is, the more chance that you actually get to that,
[00:23:09] where there's a clear understanding of both, of everybody's goals and a shared agreement to pursue those goals together. That's sort of the nirvana that we strive to get to. It's the constant quest. It's a, we say it in different conversations, silos equal sadness. In any form. Yes, Scott. Yes. Shout out to our friend Scott Oshman.
[00:23:32] But it's the constant quest across business functions as ways to come together and effectively collaborate in order to move things forward. So I don't think we could have any conversation about technology in any form in today's day and age without talking about AI. I just feel like it would be completely remiss. Where do you see the next wave of AI adoption coming from?
[00:23:59] Is it going to be a top-down with enterprise platforms baking in more AI features or bottoms up with teams using tools like ChatGPT to boost productivity? Or is it choose a separate adventure, something else entirely? What do you guys think about this? For me, it's all of the above.
[00:24:19] I think there has to be a focus among certain knowledge workers to improve their ways of working using tools like, oh, using the various co-pilots, which are essentially embedded in their tool set. There's also an opportunity to use the enterprise business applications, embedded AI, whether it's Salesforce, Einstein, to improve recommendations on the websites, whether it's SAP Jewel, to hopefully improve aspects of the back office processes.
[00:24:49] That's all coming. That's all coming. And I think that's all good. And it's all internal efficiency focused. I think at the same time, though, there is still room for the sort of more best-of-breed answers where you could bring in a Gen.AI-enabled chatbot. Chatbot did that last year to improve consumer experience where people don't have to wait for a call center agent. If their queries sufficiently, they can try with the chatbot.
[00:25:18] Or the chatbot, or more to the point, they don't always know it's the chatbot. The chatbot can start and refer them to an agent if it gets stuck. So I think that's inevitably a best-of-breed solution at this point in time because it's sternly facing and you have to make sure it's robust. And the other area where there's a lot of AI opportunity, of course, is in creation of digital content with this insatiable need for fresh content to drive digital commerce, whether it's on your own sites or retail at all.
[00:25:47] I think there's a lot of great products out there that can speed up that process. So to me, there's not one size fits all. However, they do all have to fit inside some kind of overall corporate guideline involving legal as to what can and can't be done from a risk perspective for the corporation. And that obviously varies depending on the kind of organization.
[00:26:13] What I see is it's a big unlock of time for people who are working in... Let's take commerce, for example, right? Like all those remedial tasks that you would love for someone to take off your plate so you can be more strategic or so that you can create a content strategy and not have to build everything or look at every single SKU on Amazon and type that there's no batteries in your shampoo. I did do that once when I was a brand.
[00:26:38] So it's just like unlocking those moments and then being able to do other things that are going to drive the business. And I really look at it, especially from the in-store side. For people who are focused on in-store in an organization, what can AI take away so that they can bring e-commerce more into their umbrella and they're more omni-channel focused? That's where I see the future of organizations moving.
[00:27:04] You're not siloed within, I work on in-store sales or I work on online sales. Like you are an omni-channel leader that looks across the business. And to me, AI is that unlock that will finally enable us to do that because you can't just add more humans. You just can't duplicate your in-store team to mimic on the online side. That's just not feasible.
[00:27:26] So AI will enable you to do that and to infuse more of those elements throughout the business. So you're more holistically focused on the consumer journey, excuse me, and not just on the channel. I like the take that you both offered there. And I don't know if that's the next report for Digital Shop Institute. I feel like it should be now. Maybe. I don't know.
[00:27:53] I will, you know, push an agenda here of my own, whatever it is. Whatever the topic is, we'll of course have you back, Lauren. John, it was great having you on to dig into this with us today. And thank you both for taking the time to do the research and framing this report and then to come and talk with me and Jordan today about it. So it was lovely having you both here. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for having us.
[00:28:18] And a quick plug, if you go to digitalshelfinstitute.org and you click on resources, you'll be able to download the full report. And hopefully it will be helpful in your organization. And we will make sure to include it in our show notes as well and when we share this episode out. So all sorts of ways to access it. Thank you. Thank you for listening. And as always, thank you for being a member of our community.