INDIA RETAIL FORUM 2009 - 3

Next session of the afternoon was on the role of IT in retail and this was chaired by Arun Gupta of Shopper’s Stop. Members on the panel were David Bray of JDA, Lokvir Kapoor of Pine Labs, Mark Wallace of NCR, Mohit Oberoi of Polaris, Mukesh Mathur of Oracle, Navin Joshua of V-Customer, Raja Ray of Veriphone, Rajiv Prakash of Future Group and Rakhi Nagpal of DVS. All members talked about the importance of solutions framework and the technology used to work in open architecture across various technologies. It was felt that retail solutions shall be able to sit and interface with applications across the domain for flexible growth. Unfortunately most the panel members were trying to sell their own cause and not touching the real issues faced across the industry though industry representatives like Rajiv & Arun were trying to bring the real issues on the table but everyone more in the sales pitch mode.
In my opinion IT is the core backbone of any retail enterprise and it is important that retailers adopt an approach for selling business solutions rather than technology. Today the biggest challenge in retail is the big gap between business team and IT team on understanding of the business needs. One of the key reasons is that IT of retailers is handled by technology guys and not business professionals. If I have my way I would give my IT to be handled by a business person and then identify the solutions needed. Technology is not relevant anymore and it shall not play critical role. This will also enable the retailers to get the best out of the investments made in IT solutions since business users will be able to associate more with it to achieve their business objectives. This will also enhance process discipline as well as efficiency across the business.
Once IT vendors take this approach it will also make it easy for them to make retailers invest desired amounts in the IT solutions. IT vendors need to be more aligned to the core retail business and all their pre-sales and post sales interactions with retailers shall be with this approach. Ultimately they need to take the responsibility of bridging the gap between business and technology.