What’s CarMax’s secret?

Shamim Mohammad has been CIO of CarMax for nearly two and a half years. During that time, he has led a radical digital transformation. One of the first hallmarks of this transformation has been co-locating teams from across divisions of the company, bringing IT staff and others from marketing, operations, finance, and the like. Just as digital is a topic that touches most divisions of the company and the customer, Mohammad has personified this diversity with the teams he has helped create. He also has identified different facets of digital and created product teams around each of them. This has aided in helping each team think about the customer ramifications of the work they are doing, and the evolution of each of these products as circumstances evolve. An overview of these teams can be found on the CarMax Digital site. Mohammad also advocates a philosophy of cloud first and mobile first. He notes that these are essential ingredients to ensure that IT is nimble, and that customer experience is high quality. Spending part of a day with him recently, I was struck by how often he referred to customer experience, and the need to continue to delight the customer. Mohammad is an unusually customer-centric CIO. We cover all of the above and more in this interview.

Source: Forbes