Retail Mobility – Today’s Technical Challenges
For any Retail CIO, the rapid changing technology landscape
is making it difficult to deploy in-store mobile solutions. There are a number
of implications to deploying mobile technology on the store floor, ranging from
the selection of the device, to the solutions available by device platform, to
security and potential privacy concerns.
And while all of these issues exist, it is clear that a large number of
retail organizations feel it is imperative to get technology on the floors, so
as not to be left behind.
The technology landscape has changed dramatically in the
last 5+ years. Consider the following:
- New Channels – Consumer Mobile, Social Media, Publically available API’s
- New Devices – iPhone, iPod, iPad, Android Phones and Tablets, Windows 8 PCs, phones and Tablets; each with different screen resolutions and screen sizes
- New Operating Systems – iOS, Windows 8, Android; each with a different development environment for native application deployment.
- New Data Access Requirements – Cloud, On-Premise, Hybrid deployments. Social and Public APIs. Omni-channel real-time connectivity.
Most retailers have been caught a bit off-guard with all of
these changes. Not that they didn’t see any
of them coming (we have all known the potential of mobility for some time), but
the speed of the changes, and the urgency to deploy technologies now has come as a bit of a
surprise.
Let’s be honest. Retail is often not the most up-to-date in
the technology department – at least not on the store floor. There are
certainly legitimate reasons for this – cost and risk to name the two most obvious.
Putting new hardware and software into every store, adding wireless
infrastructure, bumping up bandwidth, etc. all come with a cost associated with
them. Then there is the risk. Take POS as an example. POS is mission critical,
and having registers down for any period of time can have dramatic impact on
the sales of the organization. This is true of most in-store solutions, as issues
at the store can have dramatic impact at the head office. As a result, retailers
have most often followed the adage that slow and steady wins the race – or at
least it was until a few years ago.
Then along came Mobility. Mobility impacted customer
perception in three important ways:
- Consumer adoption of mobile smartphones became ubiquitous, and the ease of use of the devices, on the go, became commonplace. In fact, combined with the always connected Internet at home, consumers were beginning to enter the store with as much knowledge as their associates working for the retail store. Expectations began to rise.
- Apple Stores came out with a new way of ringing up customers on the iOS devices, which was seen as a far better user experience (although forms of mobile POS have existed for many years). Mobility was suddenly seen as sexy and not just practical for line-busting.
- New form factors began to arrive, creating the potential for a joint Associate/Consumer experience. While tablets have been around for over a decade (I was personally involved in a Clienteling deployment using Windows Tablets over a decade ago), the ease of use of the iPad and Android tablets made it far more feasible to deploy applications that were easy to use, with little training. And these solutions could actually augment the relationship with the in-store associate.
As Executive Management began to understand the impact of
mobility (if not just from the point of view of consumer perception), more and
more initiatives were created to leverage these new capabilities. The obvious low hanging fruit was POS, but
without some other technologies also being supported on the same device, the
ROI was sometimes hard to justify. For this reason, many retailers looked for
deploying in-store solutions other than POS in parallel with their mobile POS initiatives.
This is when the real challenges began. First, the easy approach to mobile POS was to
“bolt on” the mobile solution provided by the existing POS vendor. The
challenge here was that not all vendors had a mobile solution; or those that
did may not have had a solution on the device type of choice by the retailer. The
iOS platform was gaining the largest acceptance (particularly in the US), and
many vendors committed to creating solution on the iOS (iPod, and now iPad).
Unfortunately this created additional issues for retailers in the form of
security and privacy, as well as internal expertise. In addition, most PC-based
solutions remained on the Windows platform, as this has been the hardware of
choice for a number of years in the retail stores. As a result, IT now needed
to support multiple hardware platforms.
Globally the device of choice was not always the iPod or
iPad, as Android began to gain momentum.
While Windows was clearly late to the game (unfortunate due to the more
robust security in the platform by nature), even Windows Mobile platforms were
no longer supporting past application development (such as Windows Mobile 6.5),
so now vendors were faced with a new set of Operating Systems for which to
design, and retailers new devices (and corresponding OSs) to deploy. Add to this that fact that traditional
hardware vendors such as HP, NCR, Motorola, etc., were unable to deliver iOS
hardware solutions due to the proprietary nature of the Apple platform. As each of these vendors looked for ways to
compete in the mobile device space, they looked to Windows or Android for their
solutions; which has ultimately led to more competition, and even less clarity.
Making Sense of It
All
So what is a retailer supposed to do in the midst of all of
these changes? What follows are my
thoughts on how many of these challenges might be addressed.
In order to handle the problems associated with the above
issues, retailers should be looking for solutions that provide the following
four capabilities. The solutions should be:
- Platform Agnostic – solutions should be able to be deployed on myriad devices and Operating Systems - natively. While not 100% standardized today, HTML5 solutions provide the best cross-platform capabilities, and with the use of cross-platform development tools, these solutions can now be installed on devices natively, which provides for a much richer user experience. While there may be issues in the myriad screen resolutions and dimensions, these tools offer the promise of building code once and running it on existing PC hardware and on various mobile devices.
- Data Agnostic – solutions should be able to access data from a variety of existing data sources real-time, and operate as though the data exists within the particular solution itself. While Web Services (SOAP and Restful) are clearly meaningful, a complete Data Access Layer that can draw data from a variety of sources into a logical data model, and then operate on this logical model can be even more significant. With the availability of data providers, this can now be a reality. Such a full extraction and separation of concerns allows a software solution to integrate in a variety of ways based on the retailer’s specific environment and data availability.
- Deployment Agnostic – while retailers were cautious about storing data in the Cloud due to security risks, more and more retailers are seeing the benefits of doing just that. Hosted solutions, or Software as a Service (SaaS) has become commonplace in most industries, and retail is beginning to follow. Some information, however, does currently reside in-house, so a migration to the cloud is not practical, so solutions that allow for a hybrid deployment is a perfect compromise. This provides the benefits of the Cloud (cost savings, distributed data access, scalability, etc.) and the gradual migration of prior investments. Of course for those retailers with large IT organizations, the on premise model should also be available.
- Flexible and Extensible - solutions deployed in retail must be flexible and extensible through SDKs and configurable capabilities whereby a retailer does not have to rely on the solutions vendor to add new features, or modify the way the solution works today. While there are clearly advantages to certain features being incorporated into a base solution, there are times where a retailer may wish to leverage prior development efforts, or to create a unique set of features which provide a degree of competitive advantage they may not wish to share. This extensibility is critical to future-proofing a solution to allow for the lowest total cost of ownership.
Conclusion
Advancements in technology and in consumer expectations have
made deploying mobile solutions a high priority for many retailers; however the
range of solutions, platforms and devices has made the choice of the ideal
solutions increasingly challenging.
By leveraging technology and software development advancements,
however, retailers can now begin to address these challenges with little risk.
Solutions that can run on any device platform, can access data from a variety
of sources, can be deployed in the Cloud or on-premise, and are fully
extensible, are now not only a possibility, but a reality. Such solutions
provide the retailer the flexibility needed to leverage existing systems, and
the comfort in making decisions on their future hardware and environmental
platforms.
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