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 THE STAT 26Percentage of wireless customers who use their cell phones to take picturesMore Vitals
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MAY 12, 2004
The IT Marksman at Wal-Mart [Page 2 of 2] "ALWAYS A FOCUS." Her work showed through on the income statement. In 1999, Wal-Mart acquired the ASDA Group, a Britain-based chain of 229 stores, and Dillman was put in charge of the tech integration. Normally, streamlining an acquired company's systems can lead to disruptions and reduced store sales. But ASDA's rose by several percentage points, Schoewe says. Dillman's secret? She made the stores qualify -- by improving their standards -- to get into a queue to be converted over to Wal-Mart's information technology. Since becoming Wal-Mart's CIO in August, 2002, she has also excelled at keeping expenses down. Partly, that's because "rarely will Wal-Mart and Linda invest in technology for technology's sake," says Jim Breyer, a partner at tech venture-capital firm Accel Partners who is also a Wal-Mart director and chairman-elect of the National Venture Capital Assn. "There's always a focus on how technology can make a fundamental difference to the business." While Wal-Mart opens several hundred new stores every year and boosts its sales by about 11% annually, Dillman's tech staff, which analysts estimate to be more than 1,000 strong, increases by only 5% a year, Dillman says. That"s not much, considering that Wal-Mart is the U.S.'s largest private employer, with 1.3 million sales associates. IN-HOUSE, NOT OFFSHORE. What's for sure is that Dillman's department appears unaffected by the high employee turnover and criticism of labor practices that have hit Wal-Mart more and more. Once a month, she holds two-hour town-hall meetings with about 25 of her managers, in which each participant is asked to answer two questions: If you were the CIO, what would you change? And what would you leave the same? As a result of the feedback, last fall Wal-Mart began documenting changes made to its tech system. The company makes about 300 changes a day, Dillman says. Another town-hall meeting resulted in more flexible work hours for the tech staff. Dillman is also getting kudos from employees for ignoring the outsourcing fad. The reason is financial: Wal-Mart's preliminary studies have shown that offshoring is more expensive than writing software in-house, Dillman says. It turns out that offshore programmers tend to take more hours to complete tasks than Wal-Mart's U.S. employees do. Not surprisingly, Dillman's work can sometimes take over her life. So she resorts to tricks to avoid her tendency to overwork. When she was integrating ASDA's systems with Wal-Mart's, she would often work a full day on British time -- that's six hours ahead of Arkansas -- and then a full day on U.S. time. No more. Nowadays, she sets up appointments to meet friends so she has to leave work by 6:30 p.m. Or, she takes her laptop home without the power cord -- so that when the battery runs out after two hours, she has to stop working. DURING DOWNTIME. Though getting away from work is hard, Dillman likes to occasionally go skiing -- downhill or jet. She also likes watching Formula 1 auto races, or traveling with college friends from the University of Indianapolis. "She nudges us to get together at least a couple of times a year," says college buddy and former roommate Susan Riedy Kelley, now a manager at technology outsourcer Electronic Data Systems (EDS ). Dillman, who isn't married, also treasures getting away to her condo, which is three hours' drive from Wal-Mart's headquarters. "There are no Wal-Mart people here," she says. "No one knows me or cares. So I can go to a grocery store in a sweat suit and not worry that I'm representing Wal-Mart." Those are rare moments -- and likely to become rarer still as Dillman tries to keep Wal-Mart ahead in the world of retailing technology.
 By Olga Kharif in Portland, Ore.
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