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John Moore
The Worst of Times
In his 10-year IT career, John Moore, now CIO at Tween Brands Inc. of New Albany, Ohio, has left two senior IT jobs after sudden strategy shifts. He saw the first one coming -- a result of the long-awaited dot-com bust. The second was a total surprise.
Moore worked for Dell Inc. in the early 2000s as CIO of the Americas and then as vice president of global architecture and systems engineering. Back then, he knew that even a soft bump in the economy would cause major changes at Dell. When he joined, the company was on a hiring spree, bringing on several hundred employees a week. As Moore recalls, the mantra then was "Join now, and we'll figure out what to do with you once you get here."
Moore was part of major initiatives. Among other responsibilities, he helped develop offshore software development centers in Brazil and India. Then the tech market imploded, and Dell's growth lurched to a stop along with the rest of the sector. "Quite honestly, there wasn't enough work for everyone to do," he says.
No soul-searching was needed. Moore jumped ship and joined consumer electronics giant Best Buy Co. Inc. as senior vice president of the enterprise systems group. (Based in Minneapolis, Best Buy logs almost $32 billion in annual revenue.)
While Moore could see the end of his days at Dell, it was harder for him to predict the event that led him to leave Best Buy. When he joined in 2002, his new boss, the CIO, had just been given the additional role of overseeing the supply chain. Over the next 18 months, the boss increasingly focused on that part of his job and eventually was promoted to head the supply chain function. In turn, Moore was supposed to take his place as CIO. "We were marching down that path," Moore recalls.
But a new senior executive at Best Buy suddenly recommended a radical change: outsourcing several functions, including IT. The board agreed. Of 820 IT workers, most were offered jobs with consulting firm Accenture Ltd., a few dozen had the opportunity to remain with Best Buy and the 126 remaining were dismissed. (Sixty of the dismissed workers later joined a class-action lawsuit, alleging age discrimination; that suit is pending in United States District Court, District of Minnesota.)
Moore felt obligated to stay long enough to "get people settled" in their new roles. He could have continued as CIO of an outsourced team. Long term, though, "I wasn't really interested in managing people at Accenture," he says. Best Buy signed its contract with Accenture in July of 2004; Moore left two months later for his current job at Tween Brands Inc. (formerly Too Inc.), an $820-million-a-year girl's clothing retailer.
At Tween, Moore is in charge of building systems from scratch instead of fixing or maintaining old ones. "From a systems standpoint, we're starting over with a clean slate. I'm not going to spend my life fixing legacy messes. We're starting with a clean slate to support the growth of the company," he says.
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