After becoming CIO of Walmart.com in 2005, Rangan had the challenge of making sure that the online store stayed up and running around the clock. He said, “It had experienced a number of unexpected outages. My challenge also included carrying out the value proposition of the Wal-Mart store brand – Always Low prices, Always, and Save More, Live Better. When you shop at Wal-Mart, either in the stores or online, we guarantee that your purchases will cost less than if you bought the same goods from another source.”

Once Rangan’s team got through taking the necessary remedial steps, the online store just wasn’t opened all of the time, but it could also scale significantly to handle peak periods. In fact, on the day after Thanksgiving in 2005, Walmart.com surpassed amazon.com as the site with the highest traffic in the e-commerce space. Rangan says, “We had more than 3.5 percent of the nation’s population shopping the store on that day. It was a proud day for all of us.”

The following year, the Arkansas team asked Rangan and his team to create a global dot.com format. The transformative nature of the project would position Wal-Mart has having both a bricks and mortar and online presence in 12 different countries, including Canada, Mexico, the five countries in Central America, Brazil, Japan, the UK, Germany and Korea. He says, “The key question was how to institutionalize the largest brand in the brand world by turning the initial dot.com format into a global format. We had the challenge of ensuring a single format with multi-language, multi-fluencies, and multi-distribution capabilities. We also had to spearhead the global format from incubation to inception to proof of concept.”

In 2007, Rangan’s team proved that the online global format would work.  He said, “We blueprinted the entire concept so that it would be carried out over the next couple of years. Like Walmart.com, our global online store was another transformative initiative for this major brand.”

Although Rangan officially retired from being a CIO in 2008, he is still creating business impact of IT, as well as communicating how other CIOs can achieve it. He is currently the chief information technology officer for MarketShare Partners, an industry leading analytics firm that makes marketing more measurable and accountable than never before. He says, “We are enabling some of the largest brands in the world to determine how best to make their investment decisions, and how to measure these investments. In addition to his role at MarketShare Partners, Rangan has also written a book, called Tomorrow’s CIO: Strategic Executive Conversations. Rob Carter, the global CIO for Fedex, says that Rangan puts forth “much sound advice around how to navigate this complex and continuously changing space [of IT].”

In this podcast, Rangan explains the following:

• How to communicate business impact of IT to constituents,
• How to successfully measure the impact of IT,
• How to deal with the politics of being a CIOs,
• Why it might not be necessary for a CIO to be a regular board member, and
• How to develop IT professionals to speak the language of business.
• What business transformations he has lead

Bio

Ashwin Rangan is the chief information technology officer for MarketShare Partners (MSP), a private-equity backed company. Before MarketShare Partners, he assisted Bank of America’s Consumer Banking Sector in defining and developing new Web strategies that leveraged Web 2.0.  Rangan served as CIO for Walmart.com global. He previously was senior vice president and CIO of Conexant Systems Inc. He was a member of the founding team that spun-out Rockwell Semiconductor Systems and created Conexant.  Before Rockwell, he served in various senior management positions at AST Computer. He is a member of the governing body of both the NorCal and the SoCal CIO Executive Summit.  He frequently addresses the CIO institutes at the Haas and Anderson Schools. He has a Masters in Industrial Engineering and Management with an emphasis on IT and Operations Management from NITIE , Bombay, and a BS in Mechanical Engineering from the Bangalore University, India.

Resources

SIPAcon 2008 – Interview with Ashwin Rangan

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pR2Q-1cY7dU

Interop – Podcast with Ashwin Rangan

http://interop.libsyn.com/index.php?post_id=307719

Tomorrow’s CIO

Supply Chain Matters

http://www.theferrarigroup.com/blog1/?p=855

Production Credits

Elizabeth Ferrarini, Executive Producer

Tom Parish, Host and Audio Producer

Audio Editing by Doug Marcis

Sponsored by BMC Software