Fix the basics first: Boots Ireland CIO Michelle Kearns on implementing IT change

Until May 2021, when Michelle Kearns stepped into the role, Boots Ireland had never had its own head of IT. The position had previously been run from the pharmacy-led health and beauty retailer’s Beeston, UK, headquarters.

“I suppose there was a recognition there that we needed someone different and separate to come in and look at what Ireland was doing and how different we were from Boots UK from a healthcare and a pharmaceutical perspective, but also to look at the retail side of things,” Kearns says.

It then fell to Kearns to look at Boots Ireland’s overall tech strategy to identify the similarities and differences between its operations and those of its UK counterpart as they related to its Irish customers.

“I was trying to see where we needed to be in five to 10 years and what we had to do to get there,” she says. “And where that differed from our core strategies from either the global WBA strategy [Boots’ parent company is the Walgreens Boots Alliance] or from a Boots UK strategy.”

Kearns joined Boots Ireland at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic after nearly 17 years – four of those as CIO – at Caredoc, an out-of-hours service that provides doctors for patients with urgent medical problems. She has been heavily involved in professional issues beyond her day-to-day work, founding in 2016 the Irish network of One HealthTech, an organization that supports and promotes women and other underrepresented groups in health innovation, and she has also served as an adviser to the World Health Organization.

Making colleague’s lives better

As Kearns began to think about how to improve the experience for Boots Ireland’s customers, she realised that she first had to make the lives of her colleagues better from a technology perspective. Doing so, she believed, would enable Boots’ employees to better support customers.

Digital Transformation, IT Leadership