Bio

Dan Whitacre focuses on innovation and transforming Kroger’s enterprise approaches to data and analytics architecture, technology strategies and practices as well as its disruption roadmap. He served as the CTO and Vice President of Business Development for a technology services organization and spent six years consulting at IBM on Information & Analytics strategy and architecture. Dan currently serves as the Senior Director of R&D and Technology Transformation where he leads the internal lab ecosystem as well as University Labs at the University of Cincinnati 1819 Innovation Hub and the Northern Kentucky University's Innovation Gallery. In 2015, Dan was asked to re-join the Kroger to lead an initiative that would transform the organization to an enterprise approach to data and analytics architecture, technology, practices and strategy. For 3 years prior to returning to Kroger, Dan served as the CTO and Vice President of Business Development for a technology services organization that went through a transformation to become a data and analytics consultancy and then was eventually acquired by Data Intensity, LLC. Dan also spent six years consulting at IBM on Information & Analytics strategy and architecture in multiple industries including retail, healthcare, manufacturing and U.S. intelligence. While at IBM, Dan served as part of the IBM Federal CTO office, the Information and Analytics Tiger Team, the Big Data Champions team, as a client software advocate for IBM R&D, the IT Architecture Certification board and the Information On Demand Executive Architecture team. Dan began his technology career at Kroger where he held a variety of leadership roles in software development, re-engineering, data analytics, business intelligence and data management across multiple business units. During his first tenure at Kroger, Dan learned of the transformational power of data and how to leverage to disrupt an industry. Before entering the technology profession, Dan gained experience as a store manager and as a warehouse manager in a retail environment.