Intel recently published a thought piece entitled, Envisioning Technology’s Role In Transforming Retail’s Future. The article led off with this: “Developments in technology keep accelerating, and few industries are being pressured to change as quickly and completely as retail. The astounding speed and power of shoppers’ computing devices are turning shopping into a constant, instantaneous activity. Meanwhile, merchants are relying on new technology to meet customer expectations and to strengthen their businesses – or at least help them to keep pace. ”

Let that sink in for a second: shopping has become a constant, instantaneous activity. Just ten years ago, that notion would have been laughable to most retail business executives. Consumers didn’t physically shop every waking hour of the day. But of course, that was before the iPhone and its Android-enabled competitors blew away the “four walls ” of the store by making anywhere/anytime shopping a reality for consumers the world over.

Fast forward from about 2010 to today, and one routinely hears business executives talk about esoteric concepts like “the Cloud “, “APIs “, “SaaS “, “big data “, and “responsive design “, without really knowing exactly what they all mean beyond the fact that they are “necessary to enable the Brand “. These are truly “IT ” concepts that require a tech-focused corporate mindset. And yet retailers continue to give us signals via our benchmark research studies that IT is constrained. Those signals can be seen in our soon-to-be-published study on Mobile in Retail. In that study, we found that the top three inhibitors to making an effective mobile offering available to consumers and employees are (1) not enough IT resources, (2) difficulty getting more IT resources, and (3) budget issues.

And there you have it: the business equivalent of a deadly embrace. But getting back to what Intel made so startlingly clear: shopping has become a constant, instantaneous activity. Obviously, since consumers don’t live 24X7 in physical stores, that means they are “living ” in the digital space – and that means IT is responsible for ensuring that the digital store stays open and the digital lights stay on, all the time. That in turn means that whereas “service level management ” used to be strictly an IT operational issue, it is now at the heart of the Brand offering.

That should be making Retail business executives squirm, because in the past IT service level management was strictly “back office “. Now it is front-and-center for consumers.

The Relationship Between Software Performance And Winning

These thoughts came to mind because of two things I’ve been involved in recently. The first was an event hosted by TXT Retail in London, where I had the honor of delivering the opening keynote presentation. During my talk, I said, “right now ought to be the best of times for Retail IT’ers ” (literary note: being in London, I just couldn’t resist the reference to Charles Dickens’ Tale Of Two Cities, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness…. “, because it seems to encapsulate what’s going on in Retail right now pretty accurately).

Of course such a comment deserves a little push-back, and so after my talk, several merchants in attendance wanted me to explain myself. The most simple version of my reply was, “IT’ers for years have complained about ‘not having a seat at the table’ – but now they’ve got one. The question is, ‘now what?’ “

The second thing that brought the importance of IT to retailers’ Brand delivery is a “prospectives ” paper that we’re working on for a client regarding the relationship between software performance and winning in Retail. To prep for that effort, I took advantage of being in the UK to visit my friend Nick Goss, the SVP of Service Delivery at Lumesse, an international HRM platform whose headquarters are in Luten, near London. In March 2015, I wrote a Retail Paradox Weekly piece about Data Security & Privacy from the perspective of an international multi-tenant cloud-based solution provider that featured Lumesse and Nick.

For the “prospective ” look at the role of Application Performance Management technologies in Retail, I asked Nick to help me frame up the “5 most important attributes of effective application services monitoring/management for SaaS solutions “, and here’s what we came up with. In todays’ environment, where shopping is a constant, instantaneous activity enabled by an always-available digital offering, retailers must be able to:

• Isolate the primary source of performance problems quickly and by a non-technical user, whether monitoring code, data queries, wide area network & Internet time, or local area network time. The ability to do this in the moment is critical, both for Customer Support and Technology Operations management;
• Identify which geographies and customers are consistently having a poor experience, even if the service as a whole is achieving availability and performance service level targets;
• Identify which individual transactions are consistently poor;
• Correlate performance metrics with external load over time; and,
• Automatically scale the digital selling environment to maintain acceptable performance, based on metrics visible to system management.

Here’s the issue for retail business leaders: these are all really difficult technical competencies. This isn’t like the service levels of yore, such as “the online system came up by 7 AM “, or “the warehouse received its picking instructions by 12 AM, just in time for the shift to begin “. Nowadays, it’s important to the Brand that consumersenjoy a compelling and reliable digital shopping experience, wherever they are and at anytime of the day or night. That’s more complicated than “the old days ” by an order of magnitude.

So it is that Retailers have to think of their digital selling environment, and particularly their mobile environment, as truly mission critical, and invest accordingly. But back to our forthcoming report on the state of Mobile in Retail, that’s not quite what we’re seeing. For example, when it comes to infrastructural components to support a mobile offering, only 49% of over-performing Retail Winners and 33% of all others see value in “mobile provisioning and management services “. That gives you an indication of how far the industry must advance to make the digital offering as important to the total brand experience as an investment website such as Charles Schwab might. For customers looking to fulfill a lifestyle need, it might be just as important.

So is it “the best of times ” or “the worst of times ” for Retail IT’ers who seek to address how to get application performance management into the retail executive team’s daily dialogue? I suppose that all depends on which retailer is being discussed, but I do know this – consumers expect all this stuff to work, just like they expect the doors of the physical store to be unlocked and the lights to be on during shopping hours. So retailers can’t spend a lot of time mulling this question over.

Retail IT’ers! you’re on!