David M. Carlson, Ph.D.

Read what the experts have to say about Dave Carlson.

The Benefits of Hanging Around Smart People By Emelie Rutherford from CIO.com

Dave Carlson is a 23-year IT veteran who's been decorated with more than a dozen awards and distinctions. However, he admits to having a few weaknesses: helping people advance their careers sometimes prematurely, thinking about big-picture IT issues that are sometimes out of the scope of his job and living in Southern California. Fortunately, after serving as CIO, CTO and CEO at various companies including Ingram Micro and Kmart, he's learned how to channel his desires. Instead of doling out unearned promotions, he mentors employees. He joins committees that let him work on developing industry-spanning standards. Recently he became senior vice president of technology at New York City-based Gemstar-TV Guide International's offices in sunny Pasadena, Calif.


PARADIGM SHIFT: The New Promise of Information Technology
Don Tapscott and Art Caston, McGraw-Hill, NY NY, 1993.

“When Kmart CIO Dave Carlson set out to lead the shift [to the new technology] he anticipated losing 25 percent of his IS staff due to skill discontinuity and fallout from a change of this magnitude. In anticipation of this, a program was introduced to help staff members make the transition in their knowledge, skills and orientation.

“He told us that staff members were given the message: ‘You're world experts in something that the rest of the world doesn't care about. Give us a chance to retrain you in something which will bring you into the mainstream.’

“The result of the program was that Kmart had very little turnover during the transition.”

pp. 294-295

IN SAM WE TRUST; The Untold Story of Sam Walton and How Wal-Mart is Devouring America
Bob Ortega, Random House, NY NY, 1998.

“To save money, Kmart's technicians tried to graft a scanning system onto their existing equipment and software; but it wasn't up to the job, and they couldn't get it to work. At first, the project's director kept the problems quiet; but in May 1984, a rival manager forced a confrontation, and a flabbergasted (CEO Ben) Fauber discovered that the project was already eighteen months behind schedule on what had seemed a generous seven-year timetable.

“Exasperated, Fauber decided to bring in a new team and start from scratch. And he took a step that, in the insular world of Kmart's corporate hierarchy was nothing short of extraordinary: He appointed an outsider as a vice president and handed the project to him. He hired the Wal-Mart consultant he'd met as a neighbor a few years earlier, David Carlson.

“From outside of Kmart, it's hard to appreciate how radical a move this was. Kmart's policy of promoting from within was among the strictest in the industry. In the first days at headquarters, Carlson was told more than once that he was the first outsider to be made a vice president since the turn of the century.

“Carlson faced a Herculean task. When he arrived in July 1985, three years in to the project to modernize Kmart's ordering system, only 23 Kmart stores had scanning registers in place. And, absurdly, because of infighting between rival managers, those stores were split between two incompatible scanning systems. Worse, the whole point of the system - getting goods ordered faster - was being undercut by Kmart's Byzantine bookkeeping methods.

“Carlson's first move, with Fauber's backing, was to junk both of the existing scanning systems and start over. Kmart now shifted into overdrive to catch up. In 1987 the company would buy one-fourth of IBM's total production of scanning registers for the year; and it would commit to buy a huge supercomputer to crunch the numbers in Troy (Michigan.) Nevertheless, it would take until 1990 to hook up the more than 2,400 Kmart stores around the country.

“When Tom Nigolian, a rare senior vice president who hadn't come up through the stores, argued for using all this new data more aggressively to figure out a better selection of merchandise, he was largely ignored. After all, what did he know? He'd never managed a store.

“Some of the new computer men tried to convince the executives to let them do what they called trending - using the sales data to project ahead, and estimate demand and future orders. But that seemed too esoteric. This was something a store manager ought to do intuitively. They weren't interested. They were like a man, thought a frustrated Carlson, who bought a new Porsche and then drove it looking only into the rearview mirror.” pp. 126-127

“While Antonini boasted that sales in expanded, modernized stores were up 14 percent, the stores were on average 40 percent larger than they'd been - meaning the sales per square foot weren't gong up at all. 'It wasn't the stores; it was the merchandise,' said Carlson. ‘If you're not getting the turns, you don't need bigger stores; you need a better assortment of merchandise. ’ For example, Kmart carried 13 different toasters, when the top two toasters accounted for 80 percent of the sales. ‘You don't need a bigger store to add a fourteenth and fifteenth toaster --- you need to get rid of the bottom six toasters so you can stay in stock on the more popular models, ’ Carlson said.” p. 280

Kmart's 10 DEADLY SINS: How Incompetence Tainted an American Icon
Marcia Layton Turner, John Wiley & Sons, Hoboken NJ, 2003.

“Former [Kmart] CIO Dave Carlson depicts Kmart's information system in 1985 as one that was cobbled together over time. He states in a CIO article, ‘When I was brought into Kmart [in 1985] they had five difference point-of-sale (POS) environments. Within two years, we came up with an architecture that allowed all scanning stores in the United States and Canada to be implemented on exactly the same hardware platform. We saved about $40,000 per store with that architecture and saved $80 million to $100 million.’” p. 124

“Former CIO Dave Carlson reports in a Baseline Magazine article that Kmart had deeper problems with merchandising management. 'The company had fallen into the habit of expanding the variety of products it sold without paying enough attention to which items produced the most sales. IT could design the data warehouse and produce the analysis showing what products were gathering dust on the store shelves, but the store managers had to decide what to do with that information. Ultimately, they chose to ignore it, he says. Carlson said that the retailer's ‘top officials ignored many reports generated by the IT department that could have saved millions of dollars, ’ including proof that store managers were ignoring inventory data. Carlson says that when he presented his evidence, he was told to stop producing the reports.” p. 129

“‘The only way Kmart can stage a comeback is to scale back more than they have,’ says Professor Don B, Bradley III of the University of Arkansas. ‘...Trim the kinds of products that they carry, says (Wharton) Professor (Pete) Fader, which is exactly what former CIO Dave Carlson advised the company to do years ago - focus on the most popular products rather than trying to stock multiple brands of a product not many customers are buying.’” p. 228