Samuel Douglas / Chief Data Officer
Perspectives from a life in leadership.
The latest essay
A pharmacy chain's front-store purchases can reveal pregnancies, dependencies and illnesses that no customer chose to disclose. I argue that some conclusions should be refused outright, whatever the consent form says, and that the board rather than management should own the list.
Read the essayA pharmacy chain's front-store purchases can reveal pregnancies, dependencies and illnesses that no customer chose to disclose. I argue that some conclusions should be refused outright, whatever the consent form says, and that the board rather than management should own the list.
Loyalty offers already give different customers different net prices. I argue that in a pharmacy chain personalisation should only ever lower a price below the posted one, should never be sized on signals of need or urgency, and should leave essential health products out altogether.
Retail forecasting teams report average accuracy across thousands of products. For a pharmacy chain, the measure that matters is whether essential health products are on the shelf in the few weeks when everyone needs them at once, and boards should ask for that measure every autumn.