Five Big Trends Reshaping Retail
"Today's retail enterprises are facing new challenges that are unlike those of any other era," said Ray Wang, partner at Altimeter Group. "Businesses and individuals are driving technology adoption, not the organization's CIO." But while consumer technology change is accelerating, retail enterprise technology is stuck in the mud: "Antiquated technology impedes effective organization and process change," noted Wang.
So how can retailers learn what they need to know about using today's technology to their advantage? They need to experiment and innovate, "even if it hurts," according to Wang. "Retail companies need to fail faster, and then succeed from there."
Wang was a keynote speaker at Perspectives 2010, Epicor's Global User Conference, which has attracted over 1,600 attendees to Orlando, FL. He identified five major trends that are reshaping the retail technology landscape:
1) Mobility
2) Social Networking
3) Cloud computing: SaaS offers a number of agility benefits, such as the ability to test applications without worrying about high investment costs and the ability to flex capacity up and down to deal with busy seasons.
4) Analytics and game theory: The popular Facebook game Farmville is really about "a set of incentives to take care of your 'farm,'" said Wang, noting that these types of games can serve as testing labs for what motivates people. "Gaming theory can be applied to how retailers incent people to buy things and what offers to present them with," he said.
5) Video and unified communications: The combination of a deluge of data and more visual fluency (see the phenomenal growth of YouTube) means video and other visual representations such as pictograms, heat maps and bubble maps will become the fastest-growing way of communicating. "There's an acceleration of unified communications convergence that can be applied to learning, selling, employee training, etc." said Wang.
So how can retailers learn what they need to know about using today's technology to their advantage? They need to experiment and innovate, "even if it hurts," according to Wang. "Retail companies need to fail faster, and then succeed from there."
Wang was a keynote speaker at Perspectives 2010, Epicor's Global User Conference, which has attracted over 1,600 attendees to Orlando, FL. He identified five major trends that are reshaping the retail technology landscape:
1) Mobility
2) Social Networking
3) Cloud computing: SaaS offers a number of agility benefits, such as the ability to test applications without worrying about high investment costs and the ability to flex capacity up and down to deal with busy seasons.
4) Analytics and game theory: The popular Facebook game Farmville is really about "a set of incentives to take care of your 'farm,'" said Wang, noting that these types of games can serve as testing labs for what motivates people. "Gaming theory can be applied to how retailers incent people to buy things and what offers to present them with," he said.
5) Video and unified communications: The combination of a deluge of data and more visual fluency (see the phenomenal growth of YouTube) means video and other visual representations such as pictograms, heat maps and bubble maps will become the fastest-growing way of communicating. "There's an acceleration of unified communications convergence that can be applied to learning, selling, employee training, etc." said Wang.