Two of Asda’s tech execs – charged with leading the supermarket’s near £1bn IT systems split from former owner Walmart – are departing the supermarket.
Carl Dawson, chief information officer, and Rob Barnes, VP of digital and technology will be leaving the business, Asda has confirmed.
Both were responsible for managing Asda’s ‘Project Future’ – dubbed Europe’s largest systems implementation programme – which involves the separation of more than 2,500 systems from Walmart’s, including finance, checkouts, HR and payroll, CRM, depots and store picking.
“As Project Future nears completion and becomes part of Asda’s everyday tech operating model, we are aligning our digital leadership team accordingly,” an Asda spokesman told The Grocer.
The supermarket’s technology function will now be led by director of technology Marcus Shaw as chief information officer and Adrian Berry, current chief technology officer.
Iceland group chief marketing, customer & digital officer David Devany will join early next month as VP e-commerce & digital business. Barney Burgess, interim VP online, will take up the role of VP food online and chief analytics officer following Devany’s arrival.
Following a report by IT publication The Register on the departures, Barnes said in a LinkedIn post he had “taken the decision to leave Asda to pursue a great new opportunity later this year”.
The moves were announced on a call with Asda staff last week followed by a note to the entire business.
Barnes joined the supermarket in January last year, from M&S where he had been chief technology officer of delivery and previously CTO of food and retail.
He posted that it had been an “incredible 15 months, where we’ve landed so much technology change as a business across our stores; online; supply chain: and home office” and made “a fundamental shift in our tech & data operating model”.
Dawson had also joined Asda from M&S, in 2021, where he had been CIO since 2014.
The departures come a month since Asda announced another major round of redundancies, which saw hundreds of staff involved in Project Future exit the business. This came after the supermarket made close to 500 head office job cuts in November, including its chief information security officer and chief data protection officer.
In January, Asda said Walmart remained “incredibly supportive” of its effort to extract itself from the US chain and former owner’s IT systems, after reports it would face millions in penalty fines for missing the initial February deadline for the mammoth IT project.
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