Dive Brief:

• Nordstrom Chief Information Officer Dan Little will be retiring after three years in that role and 15 years at the company, according to memos to employees from Nordstrom co-president Blake Nordstrom and Little himself sent to Retail Dive on Wednesday. 

• The announcement comes just two weeks after the departure of Kumar Srinivasan, a former Amazon executive who was tapped to become Nordstrom’s chief technology officer less than a year ago. 

• Nordstrom is now in search of a new CTO, who will be taking on a revamped set of duties: The responsibilities of the CIO position will be absorbed into the CTO role, with Little staying on until fall 2017 to help ease the transition.

Dive Insight:

At this point, retailers have loads of data, but distilling which is most useful and — perhaps even more important — how best to leverage it, is turning out to be a major challenge. 

It’s no wonder then that several retailers in recent months, including not just Nordstrom but also Wal-Mart Stores and Target, have been playing musical chairs with their tech teams. Nordstrom shook up its e-commerce team just last fall, and Brian Spaly, CEO and founder of its Trunk Club unit, left in early January, two months after Nordstrom took a $197 million bath on the online stylist startup (more than half of the $350 million Nordstrom paid to purchase Trunk Club in 2014). 

In their letters to Nordstrom employees, Little and Nordstrom indicate that the retailer is taking advantage of the executive churn to reposition its teams, to build on the retailer’s accomplishments in the digital space and to take advantage of the open position left by Srinivasan.

“All of these goals and many more have been addressed thanks to Dan and the team’s hard work over the past three years,” Blake Nordstrom wrote. “Originally Dan felt this would be roughly a four-year journey that would culminate in a transition to a more technical leader who could support the group as they continue to implement the agreed upon road map. With Kumar Srinivasan’s recent decision to move back to India and in determining how we would address the leadership of Technology going forward, Dan felt it was the right time to share his intention to retire later this year. This enables us to conduct a full search for our new CTO who will bring us the deep technical and strategic experience we’re after to lead technology at Nordstrom.”

Little also noted three other tech openings at the department store chain and said they’re being filled while the company searches for permanent executives. Magali Muratore is taking on interim leadership of the Merchandising Technology organization in addition to supporting the Data & Services team; Travis McElfresh is assuming interim leadership of the Digital Technology organization in addition to supporting the Engineering team; and Steve Brewer will handle interim leadership of the Stores & Payments team, Little said.

Nordstrom is among retailers first out of the gate with many tech innovations, including a mobile app-enabled reserve online, try on in-store service and a chatbot shopping assistant, which has given the company some advantage. But Nordstrom, like many others, is still faced with the peculiarities of rapidly evolving consumer behavior, like the rise of mobile shopping in stores and the stubborn costs of e-commerce. 

“Nordstrom has several years’ lead on Macy’s integrating their website with stores,” Columbia University retail studies professor Mark Cohen told Retail Dive. “But they’re both falling into the trap that the internet is setting for legacy retailers” — specifically, that e-commerce cannibalizes full-line sales, while yielding lower profits.