Roundtable: "Being Graciously Disruptive"

It is in the very nature of businesses to evolve and adapt to survive and compete, but the current pace of innovation in both technology and business models means that enterprise organisations are needing to move faster, be more radical and take greater risks to reinvent themselves. ‘Being graciously disruptive’ is all about striking the right balance between maintaining the status quo and driving forward change. What a ‘state of harmony’ looks like is unique to each organisation depending on factors like industry type (e.g. regulated or not), maturity, scale, leadership, culture, as well as the size and complexity of their legacy IT estate. Some organisations are evolving what they currently have; others are embarking on radical rebuild from the ground up. Both approaches come with significant risk.

Whilst every transformation journey is unique there are common themes and aspects that form the building blocks of reinvention. This event will explore what they are, what the typical risks and pitfalls are, and how to avoid them. John’s talk will draw from his experiences at some of the largest and fastest growing ecommerce businesses in the UK, and our aim through the course of the evening is to explore how other industries can learn from ecommerce to evolve their own ways of being graciously disruptive.

Speaker bio:

John Pillar is a technology executive with a passion for and track record of driving digital innovation and transformation.

He has spent the past 20 years in e-commerce, building, scaling and transforming technology teams to be digital leaders by combining context, discovery, aspiration and content with high-end customer centric e-commerce experiences.

Whilst leading those teams they obtained various awards, including the Retail Week technology award and Retail Week’s IT Team of the Year.

John’s career highlights include transforming M&S’s technology eco-system into a multi-channel innovator. He also helped build the technology team and systems at the U.K.’s leading online fashion retailer ASOS.com, which propelled the business to be at the forefront of online retailing.

Before the world of fashion John helped shape the transformation of the retail mortgage industry through technology at GMAC–RFC with the first online mortgage application capturing and automated decision processing echo-system.

He is passionate about Agile, DevOps, Cloud and IoT technologies.

John can be regularly heard sharing his insight and experiences as a keynote speaker at various conferences such as Velocity, National Retail Federation's The BigShow, Cloud World Forum, Apps World Europe & Cloud Expo Europe and ITDF to name a few.

Whenever he gets spare time John also acts as an advisor to a few technology based start-ups in London.