Target and Tech

I am a former TTS engineer just thought I would share as story that summed up my viewpoint of Target culture and tech. This is true story for Target told to me by an old IBM Sales guy.

He got a call saying "Jack, help! we are about to open our 100th story and our systems store identifier fields are only 2 characters."

Jack replied. "I am no engineer but can't you use the alphabet?, Store A1, A2 etc.."

Target: "There is no way we are going to call a store A1."

Jack sold them $100,000 worth of customization and they re-engineered the system. Fast forward approximately 20 years.

Target: "Jack, Help! we are about to open our 1000th story and our systems store identifier fields are only 3 characters."

This story summed up my entire time at Target.

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There is a nugget of truth in this idea that long-term planning gets the short end of the stick. Temporary solutions made without long term thought have a way of not to staying temporary, and then must be rebuilt or worked around later at increased cost.

This would be a bit more than 100K exercise - you'd need to identify all systems that levereage that field and with hundreds of systems in use that would be a massive exercise. Add to that training, change management, testing, etc. 100K would not cover one #IBMconsulting resource not to mention a small army of people that they typically roll on

HAHAHA

Cute story, but "Jack" is full of it as is the "old IBM Sales GUY." I'm a former Target IS guy, we didn't call it TTS back when we turned the dial from 99 to 100, I was there and the team was very small it just didn't happen. Plenty of other crazy stories, that's just not one of them.

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Target and Tech

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