Canadian Tire's tech chief makes the case for internal FDE teams, not just vendor ones

Rex Lee, EVP and Chief Information and Technology Officer at Canadian Tire Corp., used an October 26 Forbes Tech Council column to argue that enterprises should build forward deployed engineering capacity of their own instead of relying only on vendor FDE teams. He points to the wave of vendor investment this year, including the Accenture and Microsoft FDE practice, AWS's $1 billion FDE organization and Tata Consultancy Services' plan for a 6,000 to 9,000 person FDE workforce, as evidence of how much value companies expect from the model.

His core point is about where the learning ends up. Vendor FDEs feed lessons back into their own products, he writes, while internal FDEs keep institutional knowledge, architecture decisions, reusable code and customer context inside the company. He describes a flywheel in which business teams tackle high-value problems, FDEs extract reusable patterns, central engineering hardens shared platforms and automated controls, and each new engagement starts with more leverage than the last.

Lee also warns that fast AI-built prototypes don't automatically become enterprise-grade systems, and that unchecked citizen development can multiply redundant point solutions. He frames internal FDEs as one layer between citizen development and fully engineered projects, needing clear prioritization, lifecycle ownership and a defined path from experiment to production.

For FDEs, it's another sign that the role is spreading beyond AI vendors and consultancies into large enterprise IT organizations, where the job leans as much on governance, reuse and platform thinking as on shipping quick wins.