https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._Kevin_Turner is the guy but it doesn't give any mention as to why I (and many of my peers) believe that his tenure as Walmart CIO had a strong negative influence on ISDs trajectory.
I don't have much time right now, but I'll share a moment when I saw him interacting with some people during a crisis.
We got hit really hard with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_Red_(computer_worm) even though only a minority of our systems were running Windows at the time. There were, at the time, a pair of Windows servers in each store, and each store was connected via a 56k frame relay circuit to the home office, along with a modem connected to a standard phone line for dial backup in case that was down.
Anyway, Code Red rapidly spread through all of these servers, and together they created enough traffic to basically bring down the frame relay network. We were, at the time, slightly over-subscribed at the T1 termination points, so if most of the stores on a termination leg maxed out their individual 56k links at the same time, the whole leg would be effectively down.
(Apologies for the unexpected dive into old networking stuff...it kind of just came out. :)
So most of our stores were down hard, meaning that most card transactions would not work. There was a facility to allow credit cards to go through without verification with a relatively low charge ceiling. But especially back then most transactions were NOT credit, and so weren't working.
This was a bad, bad situation, and it persisted for a number of days. It might have garnered some national news attention.
There were a number of war rooms going on. My team was in one, and we were working towards a solution by using a transient dial backup connection to reach into the store router and apply a draconian ACL.
ANYway, back to Kevin Turner. We saw him talking to a group of VPs and directors outside of our war room. He dismissed most of them, except for one, with whom he continued to have a very heated conversation.
Turner was definitely the aggressor; he got closer and closer to this person, got louder and louder. He ended up backing him against a wall and shouting in his face for a few minutes before walking away, jabbing his finger in his chest.
I don't have much time right now, but I'll share a moment when I saw him interacting with some people during a crisis.
We got hit really hard with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_Red_(computer_worm) even though only a minority of our systems were running Windows at the time. There were, at the time, a pair of Windows servers in each store, and each store was connected via a 56k frame relay circuit to the home office, along with a modem connected to a standard phone line for dial backup in case that was down.
Anyway, Code Red rapidly spread through all of these servers, and together they created enough traffic to basically bring down the frame relay network. We were, at the time, slightly over-subscribed at the T1 termination points, so if most of the stores on a termination leg maxed out their individual 56k links at the same time, the whole leg would be effectively down.
(Apologies for the unexpected dive into old networking stuff...it kind of just came out. :)
So most of our stores were down hard, meaning that most card transactions would not work. There was a facility to allow credit cards to go through without verification with a relatively low charge ceiling. But especially back then most transactions were NOT credit, and so weren't working.
This was a bad, bad situation, and it persisted for a number of days. It might have garnered some national news attention.
There were a number of war rooms going on. My team was in one, and we were working towards a solution by using a transient dial backup connection to reach into the store router and apply a draconian ACL.
ANYway, back to Kevin Turner. We saw him talking to a group of VPs and directors outside of our war room. He dismissed most of them, except for one, with whom he continued to have a very heated conversation.
Turner was definitely the aggressor; he got closer and closer to this person, got louder and louder. He ended up backing him against a wall and shouting in his face for a few minutes before walking away, jabbing his finger in his chest.
Just one story. We didn't like KT very much.