Target Shakes Up IT With More Staff, Smaller Spend

Somewhere along the way from 1776 to today, America has adopted an ethos that bigger is almost always better — bigger office buildings, bigger staffs to fill them and bigger revenue streams to pay for it all.

As far as Target is concerned, though, size doesn’t always matter when it comes to streamlining all-important IT.

In an interview with Star Tribune, Target’s new CIO, Mike McNamara, explained why he made the decision to recommend to CEO Brian Cornell that his budget was far too large for his staff on hand. Rather than try to juggle all the balls in the air that his predecessor had, the former Tesco executive said that it was a smarter idea to do a few things right than a lot of things OK.

“We were just doing too many things,” McNamara told Star Tribune. “I mean we had over 800 projects. Even a company as big as Target doesn’t have 800 priorities.”

Not only did McNamara and Cornell work to pare the slate of projects down to 80, but it’s also started a hiring spree to convert some of its inflated IT budget into IT staff instead. Over the past calendar year, 700 engineers have joined the Target family in Minnesota, while 800 positions in its IT department are currently listed and unfilled.

“I could easily fill another thousand positions,” McNamara said. “We need to have a much stronger engineering capability than we had, and we need to own it. We need to own our technology.”