The greatest gift to the business: A strong technology architecture

For businesses to compete effectively and create value, they need to be fast, flexible, and focused on the customer. This has put technology center stage at many businesses and heralds the new dawn of the tech officer as a strategic partner to the business. But what business users and customers see in technology, argues Deb Hall Lefevre, CTO for Starbucks Coffee Company, is often not what matters most in the long game of building scalable digital products. Lefevre emphasizes the importance of what lies “below the surface”: modern architecture, data, sustainment (maintenance), and security. In this interview with McKinsey partner and convener of McKinsey’s Women in Tech conference, Ann Carver, Lefevre discusses how a strong technical architecture gives businesses the ability to build new digital products and services quickly while maintaining a global mindset to ensure that technology solutions can be deployed efficiently across multiple regions. What follows is an edited version of the conversation.

This interview is part of a series developed around McKinsey’s Women in Tech event, which spotlights trailblazing leaders who are not only breaking barriers but also reshaping the tech landscape.

What happens ‘below’ that enables customer experiences and growth

Ann Carver: What do you see as the most critical technology capabilities for delivering value to the business, and how do you build an innovation mindset for yourself and the organization to continue delivering value?

Deb Hall Lefevre: The most important tech-enabled capabilities are business agility and innovation, but enterprise tech is like an iceberg. People often focus on customer or enterprise user experience and the things that are visible. These things are, of course, critical, but what’s below is what enables the experience: architecture, data, sustainment (being able to easily scale and be supported), and security practices.

An excellent enterprise architecture is the greatest gift to the business, because that’s what enables innovation and agility at scale. There are two crucial components when it comes to architecture: having a modern and composable architecture, which is purposefully built and has plug-and-play capabilities, to allow for the introduction of new capabilities; and creating a global mindset.

For a global organization, it’s important to build solutions once and then use them in many places, rather than taking a fragmented approach. Sometimes you see multiple points of sale (POS), mobile apps, or customer experiences, and that fragmentation is hard to work with. An architecture that allows for a single e-commerce engine or unified POS capability allows you to introduce innovation in many countries more quickly than is possible with a fragmented architecture.

Tech’s shift from order taker to business partner

Ann Carver: IT used to be viewed by many as a back-office function, but it’s now front and center. Can you describe the shift to focus more on building products and services that directly generate value for the business?

Deb Hall Lefevre: The main shifts include the shift to a global mindset, having a strong enterprise architecture, and the focus on being the steward of investments, where we are most focused on outcomes over outputs. I like to say that every dollar spent needs to be a dollar for the long game. That includes designing for sustainment, what I call being intentional about building things that can scale and be easily supported.

Tech leaders are uniquely positioned to be collaborators because we can see what’s happening across the organization, connect dots, and identify opportunities.

For example, when I was at Couche-Tard, we were investing in tech start-ups. As we looked for relevant use cases across all functions, it helped that I had that broader view, so I was able to bring the right leaders together to agree on the best investment opportunities for the company overall. I partnered with the CMO and COO, for example, to invest in Mashgin, a company with camera technology to speed up checkouts. That partnership was critical because this technology would only work if we had a clear view of how it would benefit the customer and a willingness to change our operational processes in the stores.

Effective tech leaders today have helped their organizations move from [being] order takers to [being] collaborators and connectors, moving at pace and providing a foundation that is a strong advantage to building the business.

Ann Carver: How are you approaching tech debt alongside building new business capabilities?

Deb Hall Lefevre: Managing tech debt is like managing weeds in a garden—it’s an ongoing process. There are two main types of tech debt. The first is traditional tech debt with legacy code on mainframes, which new technologies like containers and generative AI are poised to address, such as converting COBOL to a modern programming language.

A more challenging form of tech debt is the tech debt that stems from having a complex, fragmented architecture. This includes issues like point-to-point integrations, data islands, and overlapping tech capabilities. This kind of tech debt is harder to resolve and is the cost of not treating architecture like strategy.

Creating a sense of purpose

Ann Carver: What are the key elements of your leadership approach in inspiring and motivating your team and the entire organization to drive business value?

Deb Hall Lefevre: It starts with being clear about the what and the why—really tying the purpose of the business to what the team does so it’s clear to everyone. Part of that is trying to paint a picture of what is possible and the impact each team can have on driving growth. For me, building great teams is about connecting people with a diverse set of experiences, strengths, and expertise who share common values, including curiosity, humility, and a can-do attitude. From there, it is about fostering a culture of trust within the team that enables authentic, healthy debate where everyone is heard and the best ideas and solutions emerge.