As you’ve no doubt noted by now, we’re pretty excited about the anniversary milestone we’re celebrating this week. In her article last week, my partner Paula Rosenblum wrote a very sharp, concise (and for my partners and I, memory-jogging) look back at where we’ve been and some of the insights we’ve made since we launched our little company. Believe it or not, in our first four years here at RSR, we’ve written more than 900 documents — all available on our site free of charge to the entire industry. It’s been a busy and exciting endeavor, and we genuinely hope our insights, advice, and recommendations have brought real value to retail. Our ever-growing database community tells us that they have.

But in addition to being prolific, we’ve also been quite vocal on issues we feel strongly about. We believe part of what separates our content from our competitors’ is our expertise; we are retailers, first and foremost, and we are only interested in the retail industry. We have zero interest in comparing technology vendors’ products, and instead, focus on the business challenges retailers face in their daily lives, and how the best performers teach us all how to get past them. As a result, we believe we offer the most pragmatic recommendations available, and when we see an issue that needs a bit of hammering, we are not afraid to hammer on it. Which brings me to an issue we’ve been pounding on for quite some time, and as we look to the near future, one which we are priming our collective efforts to pound on mightily.

With the proliferation of information available to even the most technologically-challenged customers walking in off the street, today’s store is in uncharted territory. We believe an empowered Store Manager can be a much more effective navigator than most retailers are currently allowing him/her to be.

Paula highlights many of the top-line findings from our recent Store Report in her article this week. But we believe so strongly in the store manager’s potential to making the store a more relevant part of the shopping experience that we’ve elected to write an entire benchmark around the topic. We’ve never conducted such a survey before. In fact, each year when we draft our research agenda, we reserve one or two spots to call an audible — to conduct research that is so timely that it would be impossible to predict its subject even a year prior. Empowering the Store Manager is that audible this year, and for good reason.

Just a few cold months ago at the annual NRF Big Show in New York, my partners and I swiftly traveled around the show floor to hear what mattered most to both retailers and technology providers. After myriad conversations about consumer technologies’ disruptive power to the store shopping experience (and particularly after Nikki and I led foreign-based retailers on a store tour around New York City retail stores), we decided that this was the topic for us for 2011. Store managers are being asked to do too much with too little: employees have neither the training nor the tools to answer customers’ informed questions, managers have neither the technology nor availability to solve complex on-floor issues, and all of this is compounded by the fact that stores still lack the infrastructure to even guarantee the store manager’s presence is felt. We cannot overstate how important it is to have this person out from behind a wired desk, and further, to give him or her the tools and reporting necessary to make stores more than a showroom for online merchants.

The retail respondents in our annual store report know they are facing a problem, and that’s where we hope our new report will help. From this year’s state of the union report:

Last year, 39% of retailers ascribed high value to improved performance reporting to store management; that statistic has fallen to 29% this year. Similarly, 2010 saw 38% of retailers placing high value on more specific and localized direction to store managers, a number which drops to 28% this year. This creates a genuine problem: without the reporting required to gauge store performance and the direction needed to meet it head on, how can store management expect to excel?

We’ll launch our survey on this brand-new topic this week. We hope you take the time to offer your input. But we also look forward to continuing to do what we do best — hammering on the issues that you tell us need hammering, in an effort to further advance our beloved industry for all of our benefit. It has been a fantastic four years, and we are both proud of our accomplishments and eager for those yet to come. A sincere thank you for your continued engagement with us. We’re really having fun.