On my way to New York to attend NRF, I ended up taking a redeye a day before my planned flight date because of flight cancellations that happened due to bad weather. I’m used to redeyes and it’s usually my preferred option on coast to coast trips. My normal routine is to settle in and pass out as soon as I get to my seat. This trip was different however, weather patterns made it a very turbulent flight and I found it impossible to catch some sleep. As a result, I flipped open my laptop and started working on some technology that I had always wanted to learn but never seemed to have the time. The technology I picked happened to be something new in SQL Server 2008: Market Basket Analysis. As a result, I had some very interesting conversations and connections with Retailers at the NRF.
Retailers will need to make some difficult choices about investment priorities in the current turbulent economic times. They may need to seriously explore ways to get the most out of the existing IT investments, drive efficiencies and manage costs. Certain investments would need to continue to remain competitive. While making decisions on the investments, retailers would need to explore it from not only a cost perspective but also from a strategy perspective. Empowering people with insight into the business so that they can make quick decisions would make retailers far more competitive. The right BI tools in combination with a strong collaboration platform will enable employees to not only gather insights from the business intelligence data but also take action on it in a timely manner.
Innovation is a critical ingredient in driving profitable growth within any retailer. According to Boston Consulting Group, over 70% of CEO’s ranked Innovation as a top 3 priority (2005). But according to the Doblin Group, companies are only successful at innovating a surprising 4% of the time. I think some of the reasons for this include difficulty identifying and investing in the best ideas for the correct market with the right resources, a lack of coordination, and challenges measuring innovation. Organizations often do not have structured innovation processes in place to drive transparency, metrics development, or cross-functional collaboration. Current trends in innovation demonstrate that innovation can come from anywhere in the organization, it is not the domain of just R&D and engineering. It requires people to actively participate to create better processes, develop new products or services, and identify new business models. Companies don’t innovate – people do. To tap into the wealth of ideas from employees and customers, retailers would need tools that deliver a rich set of capabilities that enhance structured and ad-hoc collaboration to efficiently manage the innovation process. It is usually a lack of such tools that slow down the innovation process within organizations.
In my conversations with Retailers at the NRF Expo, I spoke about how collaboration technology can help surface all of the innovative ideas from their employees and customers using business processes that take the ideas from concept to reality quickly.