DEERFIELD, Ill. — Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc. (WBA) has promoted Steve Turner to vice president and chief information officer at Walgreens, effective April 1.

He succeeds outgoing CIO Abhi Dhar, with whom he is working closely to transition ­responsibilities.

Steve Turner

Dhar is leaving to serve as cofounder and chief executive officer of a digital start-up based in Illinois. According to his Linked­In page, the “venture provides a marketing platform for retail locations to interact with qualified local consumers through easy and elegant experiences.”

Through the end of this month Dhar is continuing to serve as chief digital officer at WBA and CIO for Walgreens.

Turner currently serves as the chain’s vice president for service delivery and infrastructure. In that role he has led delivery and operations of information technology infrastructure in support of all lines of the business, including data centers, computers, storage, databases, telecom, data networks and office automation/messaging.

Before he was promoted to that position in March 2015, Turner spent over three years as senior director of digital and mobile technology operations. His responsibilities included dealing with server, storage and network infrastructure for Drugstore.com and associated properties. He also initiated and led the first implementation of Hadoop (a big data framework) at Walgreens, and headed a cross-company task force to explore personalization ­capabilities.

Turner joined Walgreens in 2009 as director of e-commerce site operations.

“Steve’s experience and his deep knowledge of our systems position him well to move into this new role,” the company said in a statement.

Prior to Walgreens, Steve held various operations and technology leadership roles at Orbitz and Intuit. He also had engineering roles as a contractor for the Department of Defense. He has a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Chapman University and an M.B.A. from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. He also served in the U.S. Navy as a cryptologic technician.