Transformation chief leaves Asda amid Walmart divorce IT projects

The UK's third-largest supermarket chain, Asda, has parted company with its digital transformation chief amid delays in separating IT systems from former owner Walmart, the US retail giant. In an internal communication seen by The Register, Asda's joint owner Mohsin Issa said Mark Simpson, who has served as chief …

[Irongut]

chief transformation officer

chief digital officer

chief information officer

There is Asda's problem, too many chiefs and not enough Indians.

And, they all seem to have the same remit. How many pointy haired heads of IT do you need?

[Dan 55]

You do need some chiefs, unless you've just outsourced everything in which case you probably don't need any chiefs any more:

Last week: Asda kisses Walmart goodbye with half a billion dollar tech breakup bill

Looking forward to the slow degradation of service that depending on outsourcing brings.

[goblinski]

Per the article - the guy was there for 28 years. You'd expect a few titles to stack up. I'll bet he was the original Chief.

It's rarely the useless ones that are sacked first.

[goblinski]

Yeah, we all wish BOFHs and PFYs concept worked like in this here site, unfortunately they tend to either be the first to get sacked, either be Terry Childs and obviously get sacked.

[Fruit and Nutcase]

+1

too many chiefs and not enough Indians

[Anonymous Coward]

They also now have a Vice President of Digital & Technology to add to the mixer

[BenDwire]

Over-ambitious due to a lack of understanding

"Project Future was over-ambitious from the start"

You can imagine the conversation:

PHB: You must have this finished by the year end.

BOFH: You really haven't a clue, have you? It's ERP. It's SAP. I've been telling you that It's not trivial, we need more people on the implementation and there is now no way to meet your unrealistic deadline that has no basis in the real world.

PHB: Just do it or we'll find someone else.

BOFH: Good luck with that then. Bye.

Unfortunately that's a conversation I had at one of my previous employers ... and they went bust a year after I left, still with no functional ERP system.

Still, at least Asda can keep overcharging for petrol to fund this mess.

[ColinPa]

Re: Over-ambitious due to a lack of understanding

I was visiting a large organisation which used the mainframe for most of its work - sub-second response time and 99.999(9?) uptime - across 2+ sites.

A new CIO came in who announced when I was there "We will replace the mainframes with commodity hardware (x86) and run our systems on that. It will reduce our IT bill considerably"

That afternoon it was very very quiet - disturbed only. by the rustle of people updating their CVs.

I had to go back a year later and they were struggling with the performance when using multiple sites.

They ended up running both system in parallel for a couple of year - doubling their IT costs.

And the new CIO had moved on to a new job!