by Peter High, published on Forbes
11-30-2015
When Jack Clare joined Dunkin’ Brands, holding company of Dunkin’ Donuts and Baskin-Robbins in 2012, he did so after a stint as CIO of Yum! Restaurants International. He took over a traditional IT function, but two and a half years into his time at Dunkin, there was a need for someone to lead corporate strategy for the company. The leadership team called upon Clare to take on these added responsibilities. The leadership team was impressed with the job he had done as CIO, but also were pleased that he had management consulting experience, and had worked on matters of strategy in his past. The fact that so much of business strategy is enabled by information and technology was an added reason. As such, Clare, now the Chief Information and Strategy Officer of Dunkin’ Brands, is part of a small but growing group of CIOs who have taken over the strategy function. In this interview, he describes the reasons why he feels he got the combined role, the reasons why CEOs he spoke with were not surprised, and his thoughts about whether other CIOs will increasingly follow in his footsteps.
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Peter High: You are the Chief Information and Strategy Officer of Dunkin’ Brands. I thought we would begin with the two sides of your role, starting with the CIO role, as that is the role you have had longer. Can you talk a bit about what the Chief Information Officer role entails within Dunkin’ Brands?
Jack Clare: I was hired as the CIO, and it is a somewhat typical enterprise role – global IT for the organization. Being a franchise restaurant retailer though, the nuances here at Dunkin’ are that we have all the traditional corporate IT function that everyone might expect, but we are also focused on the retail systems in our stores and that face our consumers. We have a number of mobile applications and other systems that we support that have become, or evolved in the last few years to, mission critical. Additionally, I handle anything that is directly revenue-driving for our franchisees in store. Those are the two focus areas for us, but I still provision client devices, phones, etc. for our enterprise employees as well as handling all the traditional infrastructure functions.
High: You have the advantage of having IT employees who are presumably customers of your business. As a result, do you find that your employees have the ability to suggest new innovations and new technologies that might enhance the customer experience, as differentiated from an aerospace and defense company, for instance?
Clare: That is true not just in our IT function, but with our peers and colleagues in Marketing, Operations, or any of the functions. We are a broad-based consumer brand, and everyone in the company is also part of the target consumer base. As it has turned out, I have been in branded consumer businesses, on both the consumer packaged goods side and now restaurant retailing, for a number of years. I have always been in the target user base of the particular businesses that I have worked for.
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