Name: Scott Bleau
Title: director of information technology, or IT, Qdoba Restaurant Corp., Wheat Ridge, Colo.
Birth date: Feb. 2, 1971
Education: bachelor of arts, music performance (tuba), and bachelor of education, University of Northern Colorado, Greeley, Colo.
Career: hired by 12-unit Qdoba in 2000 and subsequently promoted to IT manager and director of IT; previously worked as a band instructor
Manages: one direct report and has "dotted-line authority" over nine other IT department employees
Reports to: Bill McMillan, vice president of IT
Family: wife, Laura; children Ethan, Rachel, Greydon and Benjamin
Pastimes: music and baseball
POS system: Aloha by Radiant Systems Inc.
Unit-level, back-office application: MenuLink BOA by Radiant Systems Inc.
Enterprise accounting and human resources applications: Microsoft Great Plains and ADP
Scott Bleau paid some college expenses by working at quick-service restaurants and in printer technical support for Hewlett-Packard, but after graduating he pursued his planned career in music education.
The affinity for technology and foodservice that he developed in college stayed with Bleau, however, and eventually inspired him to play a new career tune. In 2000 he quit his job as a high school band teacher to become an "IT guy" at Qdoba Restaurant Corp. of Wheat Ridge, Colo. That subsidiary of Jack in the Box Inc. operates approximately 90 Qdoba Mexican Grill restaurants and franchises about 310 units to others.
Among other professional achievements, Bleau has attained the Information Systems Security Professional, or CISSP, designation from the International Information Systems Security Certification Consortium, and he is a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer, or MCSE. Open-minded about technologies that are a good fit for Qdoba, he nevertheless remains skeptical of so-called "killer applications."
"There are, of course, areas where one size fits most," he noted, before adding that he has "yet to see an application that can perform the 'miracle cure' most software vendors tell you it will."
Bleau thinks some technologies are hyped too much, while others with true promise have yet to be fully recognized. "I would be happy if I never received another phone call from a [telephone company services] aggregator or a satellite service provider," he said, "but I think we haven't even begun to tap the potential of blogs as an information source and as a viral marketing vehicle."
What are some of the most recent IT projects at Qdoba — and some on the drawing board?
We are wrapping up a major infrastructure upgrade that is tied into meeting PCI [Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards] requirements. The PCI-compliance initiative involved me writing a fair amount of policy; that was roughly 40 percent of our compliance needs. We are also rolling out upgraded networking equipment to each of our corporate-owned stores to provide network-level antivirus, firewall, intrusion prevention, spam filtering and web filtering. Additionally, this equipment is being used to upgrade our existing VPN infrastructure so as to maintain secure communications between our restaurant support center and our stores. That was roughly 59 percent of our compliance needs. The remainder [involves] side projects, [such as] writing a program that can copy event logs offsite. Meanwhile, we are working on a new online ordering application that should deliver tremendous added convenience to our customers.
What is your opinion about cell phone payment technology and text-message ordering applications, such as those being deployed at Domino's?
It's great. Anything operators can do to make it more convenient for our customers to buy their food is a good thing. We're actually doing a limited test of this concept in our Boulder, Colo., stores.
What elements are essential to the success of an IT implementation?
Agood plan is absolutely necessary so you can think about and prepare for contingencies as they arise. However, we all know that no rollout is as pristine as the plan would have it. That's why it's imperative that we keep the involved parties fully in the loop. When things go great, communication is a nice safety check. When things are not so great, good communication can prevent an irritant from becoming disaster.
What causes deployments to fail, when they do? Any examples?
I've had some rough deployments that were universally caused by either failing to plan or failing to communicate. An example of when a communications breakdown turned an irritant into a much larger deal was the last time we switched phone companies for our stores in the Colorado Front Range region. Part of the switch involved updating every single DSL router with our new credentials and circuit information. The IT department planned the rollout, scheduled every store and even notified each store of the date they would switch. However, I neglected to include our regional managers or the then-regional director about the change and the potential issues that might arise.
What happened?
On day one of the rollout, two of the stores lost all Internet connectivity, and therefore the ability to automatically accept and authorize credit cards. Connectivity in one store was restored that afternoon, but the other store was down for almost a week while the two phone companies involved pointed their fingers at each other. We had backup methods in place for the store, and that probably would have been fine, had I not failed to include our 'above store' management in our communications.
Why has the industry lagged behind other markets — e.g., retail — in deploying technology?
Idon't necessarily agree with that premise. With that said, our tech strategy here at Qdoba has been to take care of our customers and provide them with the maximum convenience possible while getting out of the way of our operators. In order to do that, we pursue 'leading edge,' but not 'bleeding edge' technology.
How should operators partner with vendors in order to move projects forward?
Here is another area where communication is key. If you tell vendors what you want, they can make it happen. That's the beauty of the free market.
What's the best tech innovation for restaurants to make its debut recently?
Wireless smart credit cards. Giving our customers the power to control their own transactions has the potential to increase transaction speeds and their own comfort level.
