International Retailer Digital Unit - Executive Coaching

The company is a successful retailer operating in multiple countries. Corporate leadership has foreseen the (radical) change in the industry for several years and is setting active measures.

One of the measures in IT was to establish a dedictated digital unit, separated from corporate IT. This approach followed the bi-modal IT paradigm and allowed to build a new e-commerce-landscape at scale based on modern paradigms.

While applying such an "incubator" strategy creates fast results and significantly shortens time-to-market, challenges occur over time - once the digital product landscape has scaled and the organization has grown and matured. These challenges typically include establishing and strengthening business processes to operate the environment and resources effectively, establishing holistic digital / IT governance, building comprehensive cyber security capabilities, and regularly aligning with business stakeholders and corporate IT.

The goal of the project was to coach selected IT executives on topics and initiatives they are driving in the area of IT strategy, digital / IT operating model, and organizational development.

The following approach has been taken to coach selected IT executives on topics and initiatives they are driving in the area of IT strategy and digital / IT operating model:

• Understand and discuss the overall corporate development, the corporate strategy, and implications on their IT strategy and  IT operating model regularly
• Educate on industry trends, typical pitfalls, and lessons learned
• Brainstorming and co-creation sessions on particular strategic and tactical matters
• Provide coaching on typical challenges occurring in their organizational setup, such as: establishing and strengthening business processes to operate the environment and resources effectively, establishing holistic digital / IT governance, establishing cross-departmental functions (e.g., security and portfolio management), and regularly aligning with business stakeholders and corporate IT

The engagement length for coaching the IT executives on their particular matters was a set of years. During this time, the coaching intensity was aligned to the client's needs and occurring topics.