Alan French, Chief Technology Officer, Marks & Spencer
Alan French, Head of Strategy and Architecture, has been with M&S since Oct 2006. He is responsible for both the IT and logistics strategy and the overall design of systems across M&S.
Prior to joining M&S Alan was the CTO for the Boots Group Plc and led the architecture team in the design work on Store system replacement, the largest SAP retail implementation in Europe and the design of Boots’ dispensing system, as well as leading the infrastructure programme. Prior to joining Boots, Alan was the CTO of a number of technology based consulting companies.
Alan has had 20 plus years of experience in IT, and has designed and built a large number of IT systems, ranging from ones in financial services through manufacturing to retail. He has an academic background in massively parallel processing computing, and has specialised in building and tuning business applications that required MPP architecture.