Linking IT with business strategies is easier said than done. The demands facing today’s retailers are more numerous and complex than ever before. Consumers have come to expect more value and higher service levels, while retail executives want to leverage technology to attain marketing, operational, and financial advantage. Corporate governance boards demand due diligence scrutiny and outside regulators continue to add rigor into financial reporting and business processes. As a consequence, the IT project request backlog continues to grow and retailers search for ways to measure IT’s business value and to balance the effective utilization of the IT resource.
Are Business Strategies Dependent on Technology?
Creating a retail IT strategy can be the result of an active and engaged IT organization that partners with the leadership teams of separate business units on a cross functional basis. This partnership can take the form of shared educational experiences, industry analysis, competitive trend observation and analysis, and thought leadership relative to emerging technology and applications. Through involvement with the business units, the IT organization can evolve from being a service enabler for business units to a technology competitive advantage driver across the entire company.
Retail IT- Fashion or Fusion?
The Business-IT Fusion approach enables retailers to frame IT initiatives with quantifiable business cases plus business objective alignment. This approach, when combined with an understanding of best practices from both within and outside of the retail industry, becomes invaluable in the decision-making process. The retailer can then refine and rank company mission-critical initiatives, and define a multi-year phased approach to achieve business results. The end result is IT direction aligned with corporate direction.
The Anti- Climax
For most retailers, IT is not seen as a strategic partner of the business — it is simply viewed as a cost that needs to be better controlled. One reason for this is the widely-held belief that only a small percentage of IT projects yield their expected results, and that many projects exceed their time and budget constraints — or are abandoned all together. Considering that most retailers do not have an IT strategy aligned with their business objectives, the implication is that a large portion of their IT project spending is either unproductive or not supportive of business goals.
