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Who's Who: Scott Hallihan

As IBM's worldwide kiosk solution manager, Scott Hallihan's charter is to watch industries and determine if IBM is covering those markets in a strategic way.

September 1, 2003

Scott Hallihan, 37, has been an IBM guy his whole career. Even in college he worked for Big Blue. So he has an interesting perspective on technology in retail, and a broad view of the kiosk industry.

Hallihan, worldwide kiosk solution manager at IBM since November 2002, oversees kiosk deployments in all of the geographic areas IBM covers, including the Americas, Europe and Asia-Pacific. Right now, the most action is in Europe and North America. But he is also seeing activity in Asia and South America.

Hallihan's charter is to watch different industries and determine whether IBM is covering the markets in a strategic way. "If we think a space is critical to our business, we will find solutions and partners for that space," said Hallihan. He explained that IBM provides the platform, middleware and services, business partners focus on the applications specific to a market.

Hallihan is also responsible for making sure that IBM's brand and messages are clearly and consistently represented around the world. "I work with worldwide teams and have to get agreements on the hot topics. We try to have a global focus while letting the different geographical teams work on their own needs," he said.

The benefit of being involved in many big kiosk deals is that Hallihan is well-known in the industry -- and to customers. "My name is out there. It's good for me because I keep close to the action. If I sat at a desk and didn't get my feet dirty, I wouldn't have credibility," he said.

Scott Hallihan, IBM

Areas that he sees as very attractive for kiosk providers include:

*Self-ordering and paying for food;

*Sales assistance, or providing information to browsing shoppers;

*Digital merchandising, through which customers could learn about product comparisons and ratings and get recommendations for their specific needs;

*Human resources, including access for deskless workers as well as recruiting;

*Photo kiosks, which Hallihan said get hotter every day;

*Airline, train and some hotel information kiosks that could make transactions more efficient for travelers.

"We have a presence in all of these bright spots," said Hallihan. He added that IBM also does custom work for clients that have specific business issues to solve.

Hallihan said he sees kiosk evolving into appliances that are self-configuring, self-healing and self-optimizing. "The software will become more powerful and the systems will get better at device-level control."

Blue background

Hallihan has been with IBM since 1988. He first worked in all areas of the retail division, which he enjoyed because of the entrepreneurial spirit of the group. "Retail is an IBM core competency, and the retail division was run as its own company within the company," he said.

He even worked at IBM during college. He was part of a co-op program, under which students took a semester of classes and worked for another semester. Hallihan earned a degree in computer engineering from Clemson University, and his MBA at Duke University.

Listing challenges

Hallihan is well-aware of the challenges that the kiosk industry faces. He said that, unfortunately, there have been notable failures that reflect on the overall kiosk segment. He noted that many kiosk projects don't get past the pilot stage or never get the funding to get off the ground.

"With a lot of these failures, the people involved didn't focus on delivering consumer value. It sounds so simple, but you have to determine if the consumer will stop and take the time to learn how a kiosk might help them."

A related challenge is managing the complexity of kiosk projects. "The kiosk industry has low barriers to entry. A company might just start selling kiosks but not have the skills for supporting an entire solution."

And then, of course, there is the financial side of the equation. "Budgets are so tough to get. And ROI is often hard to articulate with kiosk projects," said Hallihan.

The final challenge Hallihan pointed out relates to making kiosks part of a business culture. "Too often kiosks are a stepchild project. If you don't get buy-in, there isn't a good chance the project will survive." He used airlines as a positive example. "Those kiosks are right out in front. They are a mainstream way of conducting business," said Hallihan.

Also, he said companies need to incorporate their kiosks into their network infrastructure, managed right alongside of databases and other back-end systems.

View of the little guy

Hallihan admits that IBM has some obvious advantages in the kiosk market. "Everyone knows we will be here three years down the road," he said with a laugh."And no other company can provide the breadth and depth of capabilities in bringing a solution together to solve our customers' business problems. We offer strong service and support."

But IBM sees the value in partnering with industry vendors. "Single providers are key part of our strategy. They can be a key component of our projects," he said. "Smaller companies can also leverage IBM to do their roll-outs and service work."

Of course, he agrees that IBM does go head to head with its business partners on some projects.