CIO Interview: Paul Coby, CIO, John Lewis

Coby discusses his priorities, including investing in core systems, and improving customer-facing front ends

Paul Coby, CIO of John Lewis Partnership, told Computing recently that two things are top of his agenda, and that between the they "tell you about challenges and fun of being a CIO these days."

"At one end is big-scale investment in core systems," said Coby. "We're putting in new merchandising systems both into John Lewis and Waitrose, we're doing a new order manager system, we're investing in the big stuff that makes the business work. It's really important, a bit traditional, but it's vitally important in terms of productivity cost.

"The other thing is investing in front ends. Retail, grocery, it's a fast changing world. The way we all shop, the way we interact with John Lewis and Waitrose, the way we interact online and in stores is moving very quickly. We need to adapt to those customer needs. We need to understand where our customers want to go, and help them get there. That means we're doing an awful lot with johnlewis.com which is now between 40-50 per cent of our sales, though it was over 50 per cent on Black Friday. We're investing a lot in making those front ends really useable. We're also investing in mobile, responsive and apps as well.

"If you're responding to customer needs, it's not just about nice front ends, that's really important, but it's about the entire end to end process. So the fact that you can order on johnlewis.com before 8pm, then click and collect at any store by 2pm the next day is because we've also invested in our distribution systems, in order manager, and we've invested in very automated warehouses to enable us to provide our customers with that experience."

He also explained that CIOs need to be a combination of techies, business people and visionaries. Watch the video for the full interview.