Striking a healthy balance between innovation and mainstream technology is essential for the modern CIO, said Mr. Price Group CIO Kim Shim. As such, she needs to keep an eye on the spectacular rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and its use cases, as well as developments across long-standing topics such as big data, RFID, and cybersecurity.
This ability to maintain two different world perspectives is critical for Sims who inherited highly complex legacy environments and are currently in the process of modernizing these systems.
“It’s a basic, unsexy ‘it just has to happen,'” she says. “Even if it keeps us busy, we can’t afford not to deliver when it comes to innovation and realizing the desires and needs of the business.” We try not to create unwieldy technical debt.
She often finds a symmetry between what the business wants and what she and her team need to do to deliver a sustainable, secure and flexible business architecture now and in the future. I admit it is important to find out.
“In theory, if we decide to expand into another category tomorrow, we want to create an environment where we can easily accommodate this,” she says. “This can sometimes mean putting energy and effort into things that companies don’t necessarily want or understand.”
e-commerce and chatbots
Sims have been particularly busy in recent years with two very different types of endeavors. The first is not about emerging technologies, it’s about modernizing your business and knowing your customers.
During the pandemic, Sim and her team launched an e-commerce platform for one of their retail brands, a women’s clothing store called Miladys. The brand has never had an e-commerce presence before, so it was unable to operate when the world went into lockdown.
“We know Milady’s customers are more conservative, so they were hesitant to go back to the store, even if restrictions were eased,” she says. So the problem they were trying to solve was finding a way to increase sales in a way that made customers feel safe and comfortable.
They knew they needed to get something to market very quickly, and their online product had to remain ‘vanilla’.
“The solutions we run in other businesses are much more complex, but for this project, we just wanted to give them a ticket to the game,” she says. However, that doesn’t mean the execution process was simple. According to Sim, building an e-commerce service from scratch means capturing images of all products and creating product descriptions, choosing the right approach to fulfilling orders, It means things like training store staff to do things they’ve never done before.
“It was a great project in that we were able to do something in a very short amount of time,” she says. “We were incredibly agile, made decisions quickly, had support from upper management, and everyone was on board with what we were trying to achieve. It was successful, and even though it was expensive to set up, we were able to see returns in a very short time.” I made it.
“Even now, if I go to the Miladys website, add an item to my shopping cart, but don’t check out, I get a call asking if I need help with the checkout process,” Shim added. .
A second project uses natural language processing (NLP) to leverage chatbots to digitize the customer experience for some financial services products. Freshbots is a chatbot platform developed by customer engagement software company Freshworks that was introduced to enable groups to understand and interpret customer questions, provide support, and automate routine tasks. With these chatbots in the wild, customers can easily apply for credit, submit insurance claims, update their personal and account details, and request authorization numbers for card replacements, all without speaking to anyone. can be done. This project was intended to reduce the workload of the customer service team. “By eliminating the need for customers to visit a physical branch or complete lengthy paperwork, our teams are more efficient and our customers are happier. This is a win-win for everyone.” she says.
back to basics
As part of this modernization, Sims have spent a lot of time managing what the business used to do and what it does now.
“When you work with companies that are used to legacy, you can go to the developer as a user and say exactly what you want to say,” Sim says. “They can develop things without limits. But if you want something to be scalable and secure, you have to choose a platform solution. Our strategy is to use an off-the-shelf SaaS solution. As soon as you do this, you’re limited, and you can’t break the foundation, so it’s a lot less flexible.”
This requires a significant shift in expectations and a lot of change management. Because before, people could always do what they wanted, but now they can’t, at least not for now.
“Before you do a lot of innovative things, you have to lay the groundwork, and unfortunately laying the groundwork doesn’t excite anyone,” she says. “This may be an unacceptable reality for companies because they spend so much time and money on things that don’t change their day-to-day. When you look at it, you can only speed things up if you have the basics in place.”
For Sims, to make sure companies understand why they’re doing what they do, manage expectations and present long-term strategies so everyone understands the path, the goals, and how long it will take. It becomes important to to get there. And while she may have people’s hands full by replatforming her business, she knows she can’t keep saying no to everything else.
“We can’t afford to tell companies to put all ideas on hold for the next five years and ask nothing until they’re ready to work on new demands,” she says. “This is why I keep saying that this is kind of living in parallel. We need to prioritize modernization efforts while enabling innovation.”
