Dick Smith's CIO on the benefits of ‘Tinder-style’ supplier relationships

Success in the highly disrupted world of retailing requires an IT leader capable of adapting to rapid change. Dick Smith’s Paul Keen is driving his company’s transformation into an online retail powerhouse while operating within razor-thin margins and the knowledge that any misstep can open the door wider for disruptive competitors.

What is an example of a recent project involving a third party?

We try not to do really large projects. What we do are themes, and we build those out. The big one is around digital, and we want to become a digital-first organisation, as that is effectively how our customers interact with us. We grew our online capabilities from 2 percent of our business to 7 percent. We are $1.4 billion company, so in order to grow that aggressively we had to build scale. So we worked with Anchor, which provide cloud managed services on top of AWS, to right-size our cloud environment to make sure that we could do this with the very spiky load that we have.

What role do you see third parties playing in terms of your cloud strategy?

It is fine to build up your cloud environment, but you still need that expertise. And what I found with cloud is it is very, very easy to do the easy stuff, but it is actually quite difficult to do the difficult things. It requires expertise in configuration.

What does a third party need to do to impress you?

It’s a bit of cliché, but they’ve got to understand the business and not try and make a whole bunch of assumptions first. So listen to us, understand what we are trying to achieve, and then show us some real examples around what they have done in the past.

What mistakes do service providers make?

The first one is they always tell me what the return on investment is going to be. And that drives me nuts, because they have no idea. And they always choose ROI as return on revenue, but I need to have it as return on profit, and they have no idea what my margins are.

How are your relationships with suppliers changing?

We have these Tinder-style relationships with our vendors, where we like to try things quickly, and there is not a lot of commitment upfront. And if things work, great, then we commit to that relationship, and if it doesn’t work, we can walk away. It’s the same with cloud – everything cloud should be very fast to try out, and it should be easy to shut off if it doesn’t work out.

Do you see the role of third parties growing or shrinking?

I find resellers generally slow-up the process. The really good resellers will introduce you to concepts you probably haven’t thought of. But a lot of time resellers are getting in our way in terms of doing the deals quickly. 

RESUME

Mar 2015–present  CIO, Dick Smith Electronics

2013–2015  GM, information technology, Dick Smith Electronics

May–Nov 2013  GM, software development, Salmat Digital

2011–2013  GM, technology & development, RedBalloon

2009–2011  Program manager, Westfield

2006–2009  Senior program manager, ninemsn

Awards

iTnews CIO of the Year Finalist 2012, 2015

Education

2006–2012  MBA, Macquarie University – Graduate School of Business

2006–2010  Master in Management, MBA, Macquarie University –Graduate School of Business