Dave Welch

Norm met House of Brick Technologies ten years ago. Over the years we had the opportunity to get to know his IT organization fairly intimately. Norm was more than a CIO at Gordmans. He was instrumental in the restructuring of the company as ½ Price Stores emerged from bankruptcy. The organization went on to defy the odds and has expanded in both good and declining economies. Norm helped develop a scrappy, shrewd, amazingly data-centric organization for its size, with these “IT-uncharacteristic” attributes in particular: An amazing amount of tenure (loyalty) in the employees, with many exceeding twenty years; No full-time DBA ,even prior to the House of Brick association; An uncanny amount of IT hardware infrastructure assembled for pennies on the dollar; A substantial, yet appropriate amount of custom-designed add-on functionality into Gordmans third party retail and distribution system, and a mature home-grown ad-hoc business intelligence infrastructure, putting off the need for more formal, expensive business intelligence systems. I attribute all this to the leadership and vision of a CIO that understood business needs, systems detail, the appropriate balance of third party expert systems and in-house integration, and tied it all together to maximize ROI.