The retail landscape is becoming increasingly competitive, with Amazon repeatedly disrupting the industry. It can seem like the retail industry is in crisis; what is actually happening, though, is that the retail industry is undergoing some profound changes and most retailers are treading water.
The retailers that are winning are those that have a strategy to more effectively use technology to create more human, deeper relationships with their customers––whether it is through sending personalized coupons to customers’ phones or providing customers with AI-powered shopping assistants. The challenge, though, is that customer preferences and the broader retail landscape itself are changing so quickly, and in such unexpected ways. This means that creating those experiences depends on the agility of a retail organization, which in turn dictates how responsive it can be to customers’ changing needs.
Retailers today are starting to realize that to meet these ever-evolving market needs, they have to become great at change. Adopting new technology is not the solution itself — there is no silver bullet to overcome the problem of change management in retail. In order to build these unique relationships, retailers must be able to weave or integrate modern and legacy applications, systems, and devices together and provide them to different audiences––whether it is employees, suppliers, third-party resellers, or customers.
Realizing an effective integration strategy is not simple, but it is possible. Learn from the experience of Clothing Haus, a fictional retailer, in our book Project Nightingale. Inspired by the Phoenix Project, a popular book in the IT space that leverages a narrative to discuss DevOps, we present a hypothetical scenario to share both the business and IT perspective.
The company’s new eCommerce initiative, codenamed Project Nightingale, is critical to reducing customer abandonment, but the project is running behind schedule. Jamie, the VP of Womenswear, wants to improve the online shopping experience and keeps adding new features for IT to deliver. Travis, the head of Strategic Architecture, is feeling overwhelmed with the list of tight-deadline projects and the difficulty of working with older, legacy retail systems. In order to provide digital offerings to customers and compete in the changing retail landscape, an entirely new approach to integration is needed.
Learn more about Clothing Haus’ experience and explore the integration approaches that retailers are using to transform digital retail experiences for their customers.
