One of the problems with living in the research analyst world is that it’s easy to develop an “if it can be thought up, then it can become real ” outlook. If that was always the case, then I can look forward to never getting whiplash from a biting wind in New York City in January and we will all be able to instantly get a cab from Javitts at the end of every day during NRF’s Big Show.

Dream on. But what should be do-able this year at the Big Show is for the industry to get beyond theory and into the pragmatic details of how business intelligence and analytics solutions are being used right now to create real value for companies. This is where I have to disclose that I am a real “information strategy ” junkie – I think it’s important to the point that there’s an almost direct correlation between those companies that believe information & insight is a strategic weapon and “winning “. So it amazes me that BI & Analytics technology continues to be such a hard sell. Perhaps its because those (like me) that like to yack on and on about entities, relationships, attributes, atomic and unstructured data, etc. etc., are true geeks and very likely to be terrible sales people – they (we) actually obscure the business value with all the technical jargon and cryptic “best practices “.

But in the retail industry, history is repeating itself. In the late 1980’s the value of insights derived from item-level sales information seemed endless, and those retailers that embraced its strategic value early on became industry leading Retail Winners. Now, there’s explosion of new data available that reflects consumers’ shopping habits and preferences that dwarfs the volumes of data from those earlier times, while the tools that analyze all that data are quantum leaps ahead of the past too. And as RSR’s latest study on BI & Analytics in Retail (to be released later this week) shows, those retailers that understand the strategic importance of new insights are already becoming the new generation of Retail Winners.

My NRF 2014 wish is that all the discussions about “next generation BI & Analytics in Retail ” will be pragmatic and non-theoretical, so that more retailers will get on with it. At least my retail analyst self thinks that the industry is ready for it. Here are non-theoretical facts from the new study that leads me to that conclusion (please also read Paula’s column, re. BI for small and mid-sized retailers):

• The ability to plan and execute more effectively has supplanted reporting results as the most important use of data that retailers collect.
• Retail Winners continue to focus on the challenge of understanding what consumers are demanding, while Laggards look over their shoulders at how their competition is responding to consumer demands to model their own responses.
• Winners consistently put more emphasis on making decisions using experience/intuition AND data.
• Retail Winners are moving beyond understanding customer preferences to acting on them efficiently, with improved inventory effectiveness and improved Marketing effectiveness driven by BI & Analytics.
• Data visualization and predictive modeling are becoming important to retailers’ “basic ” BI & Analytical capabilities. Winners are moving faster to deliver insights for operational use through mobile access, alerts, web browser access, and scorecards & dashboards.

So that’s it. My hope is that very soon, the idea of an Enterprise-wide BI strategy will so realized across the breadth of the industry that demos of new BI & Analytics technologies won’t have to spend time on the “why you need it ” hard sell messaging, but instead focus on nuance of how to get the most out of your investment.