Being Technologically Nimble

Being technologically nimble means being able to respond quickly to new requirements and needs, and being able to support change on a rapid basis, even large scale changes. Being nimble involves both a philosophy of how you select, implement, and use technology, and how you manage your team of IT professionals behind it. Standardizing is important because we need to minimize the number of different technologies we have to manage. This links directly back to keeping things simple. As we build new things and put new systems in place, we work to do it in a modular way so that we allow ourselves the flexibility to change solutions more easily in the future.

Much of what we do is provide systems that support our customers and associates out in the field, as well as here at headquarters. One of the biggest challenges you have in a corporate environment in an enterprise like we have is integration of new things into your existing environment. We focus a lot of attention on how we can minimize the touch points between different applications, and make sure that we are able to bring in and out different pieces of the application at different points in time. From a technology perspective, a lot of our focus here is on how we can use middleware technology in between our applications to create a buffer that allows us more flexibility as we make changes around the business. Again, we always focus on simplicity, trying to keep things as simple as possible so that it is less complicated when you are faced with needing to make modifications. It is then easier to understand what is going on in the environment and identify places where you need to make changes and then implement those changes.

Staples has made a conscious effort as we've built out different parts of our business to refrain from building anything twice. If we already have something somewhere within the organization, we are going to try to leverage that as much as possible. A good example in our dot-com business is that we already had a delivery and catalog operation that had customer service and distribution fulfillment. Rather than going out and creating a separate instance of that for the dot-com part of our business, we built the dot-com part to be just a new order acceptance vehicle that could get orders into our existing customer service and distribution infrastructure. That has benefited us because we are able to then provide for our customers a single view of the company. When they call the Staples call center, they can ask about a catalog order they placed or a dot-com order they placed. We have also integrated the dot-com part of our business into our retail stores through in-store Internet Access Points (or kiosks), as a way to order products from our online inventory while in the stores. Again, rather than building something new to take an order in the store, we have adapted Staples.com to the store environment, leveraging the Staples.com infrastructure.

We focus on knitting all of our systems together into a common set of services to our customers across all of our different channels. Being nimble is a key part of implementing and further developing our multi-channel business to serve customers however they want to shop with Staples. This is our way of doing business now and in the future.