Dan Snell joins Lowell

Meet Dan Snell, Lowell's tech guru 

Dan Snell is Lowell’s new Head of Enterprise Architecture. He joins us following similar roles at Brother and Very/Shop Direct. Dan lives in the Peak District with his wife and four children.

Lowell has reached a size and maturity where there’s a lot of moving parts. My role is to understand all those moving parts and to help the Executive team make the right decisions about how to improve things that deliver on their strategy.

I make sure we have a clear roadmap. So we can implement the Exec’s strategies, we need to understand all the impacted teams and technologies.

Departments know everything they need to do in their world. But they might not realise that the technology that underpins it is relatively complicated. Some choices that they make, which might seem simple and intuitive, could cause all sorts of headaches for other teams or Fujitsu, our technology partner. Or it might mean you have to change things in 27 different places to combine into that one ‘simple’ screen that they want.

My global view means I can build a comprehensive roadmap. I look at the outcome we want and then work out who all the impacted teams are and what activities we need to do to get to that outcome.

Like, what happens if one of those teams is fully busy for six months? So if you want to do this thing now, you’re going to have to have a conversation about changing that team’s priorities. Maybe another of the activities involves signing a contract with a new vendor: that means we’ve got some procurement work to do. Have we thought about training? We may need to run training sessions for the people who are going to use, support, and administer the tech before it goes live.

I’m here to look at the big picture. That helps me ask the important questions, ‘were we aware that we have this, this, this, and this, and that there are these risks and issues with each one of them that add up overall to these problems?’

My main function is to smooth the flow of change. I make sure we set up predictable, well-understood projects or initiatives so that when people from transformation and tech are ready to pick them up, I can give it to them and say ‘here you go, we’ve thought about what it is and what it looks like. There’s your scope, there’s your set of impacted teams, here are some key decisions we’ve already made to save you having to make them’.

I’m also looking at the project through a governance lens. I make sure that the designs for the project – both technical and organisational – will deliver on the blueprint and ROI that we want. If you don’t have that as an organisation, you can sometimes see scope creep because the designs aren’t tight enough or people are taking advantage of the project to fix something that’s beyond the reason why the Exec have authorised the work. So I ask, does the design deliver technology and engineering best practice, security best practice, data protection and so on?

We’ve recently delivered a new Avaya AXP contact solution. Agents working on the email and chat channels were struggling to work with different legacy systems. It was a pain to switch between them. People needed more training. And they had to sign-in separately to each system. When one of the systems reached end-of-life and lost its support, we decided to replace both with a single combined solution, the Avaya AXP.

Sometimes, tech doesn’t look like the obvious solution to the problem. We noticed that whenever we onboarded a new client or portfolio, customers would flood us with calls asking repetitive questions about their account. We knew there must be a smarter way to handle it. So we’re running a proof-of-concept for QR codes that lead new customers to a page that pulls in the information that they’re asking for.

As a discipline, Enterprise Architecture can be poorly defined. It’s interesting. Lots of companies employ people with that title but I’m not sure we’re not all doing the same thing! 

Want to know more about how we use technology to drive our business?

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