Having celebrated its a centesimal anniversary final 12 months, Canadian Tire has needed to carry out some deft manoeuvring within the final couple of years to turn into extra agile. And along with his twin titles on the firm—CIO and CTO—Rex Lee is within the driver’s seat to help digital transformation and implement shared data throughout groups and administration. No small feat contemplating he’s answerable for a bursting portfolio that covers a household of firms together with Canadian Tire retail, Sport Verify, Mark’s, Celebration Metropolis, Professional Hockey Life, and several other others.

“I moved from telco to tech, excessive tech to retail, however didn’t assume I’d make that bounce, nor thought retail can be invigorating,” he says. “However I used to be improper. It’s so thrilling. I didn’t understand how embedded expertise was in every thing in retail. And holding multiple function is a little bit of a development proper now. The concept being that expertise, whether or not it’s inside or buyer dealing with, has sure constructs that may be utilized extra broadly. And in case you’re capable of unify these items, you may harness the ability of economies, longer-term pondering, and higher scalability. So my function isn’t simply operations and the way issues work in the present day, but additionally what’s subsequent and the way will we evolve.”

And naturally with a 100-year-old group come programs that generally aren’t fully trendy. Because of this, particularly through the pandemic, the complexity of legacy infrastructure held again a capability to attain new issues. Discovering a option to evolve by conventional IT was important, and options largely emerged by obtainable expertise.

“It’s wonderful what occurs whenever you empower folks and belief them,” he says. “We didn’t should compete with priorities of getting cash into the corporate to maintain it working. There was no actual IT in enterprise. It was all one staff working collectively towards the identical objectives. I felt so supported by my friends. Generally expertise will get blamed for issues, however everyone realized that it was the scenario. As a result of we had been already down this journey, it helped speed up the transfer towards an agile working mannequin the place you mix enterprise and expertise groups underneath a single construction. You want the tone on the high and it is advisable have that chance to have the ability to carry issues collectively. With out that, it’s actually exhausting to create alignment and talk.”

CIO Management Dwell Canada’s Rennick lately spoke with Lee about his nonlinear profession path, the synergy of digital transformation and retail, and the digital overhaul to the enterprise by, and after, the pandemic. Watch the total video under for extra insights.

On following the principles: I began my profession at Bell Canada and one of many issues I discovered there was breaking the principles. I generally requested people when it’s acceptable to interrupt a rule when the rule doesn’t truly obtain what it was supposed to attain. It forces you to rethink the rule and what you’re doing. Once I began at Bell, I used to be on this row of cubicles and on the finish was a giant pile of outdated PCs, and I took it upon myself to construct a server out of them. I then networked it and created shared capabilities, which we didn’t have available again then. It was nice for info and doc sharing, collaboration, and people form of issues, however I obtained in somewhat hassle as a result of I wasn’t speculated to take aside gear and hook it into the community and create privileged entry. However it obtained me seen in some constructive methods, in addition to obtained me pondering exterior the field of what my day-to-day job was, saying there’s a greater means of doing this.