Giant Eagle CIO: Business Partners are More Often Trusted Advisors

Kirk Ball, Giant Eagle EVP and CIO,, speaks with David Hammond, Senior Account Executive, Parallel Technologies, about the role of business partners and the approach to outsourcing.

Speaking about creating an insight-driven organization, Ball says that business partners can share specifics of customer implementations, can help understand how the tools are being used, or provide insight into other areas in their roadmap.

He explains that business partners can help in connecting with their customers to collaborate. They can also highlight wrong steps and provide good recommendations about areas that have been tested and proven.

Ball elaborates that business partners are more often trusted advisors. It is not about the transaction all the time, but about the length and the quality of the relationship.

When asked about how he determines when to outsource or use internal resources on projects, Ball highlights five key aspects:

1. The time sensitivity of a particular project.

2. Skill sets available internally.

3. If that skill set needs to be maintained for the longer term.

4. Cost. 

5. The critical viability of a particular solution to the enterprise.

He reveals that a key area that he is focused on internally is automating commodity work like monitoring. Their automated monitoring systems can now monitor and alert when required.