Apac
  • Home
  • CXO Insights
  • CIO Views
  • News
  • Conferences
  • Newsletter
  • Whitepapers
  • About us
Apac
  • Admired Tech

    Agile

    AI Healthcare

    Artificial Intelligence

    Augmented Reality

    Aviation

    Big Data

    Blockchain

    Cloud

    Cryptocurrency

    Cyber Security

    DevOps

    Digital Transformation

    Drone

    HPC

    Infrared

    Internet of Things

    IT Services

    Marine Tech

    Networking

    PropTech

    Remote Work

    Robotics

    Scheduling Software

    Sensor Tech

    Simulation

    Smart City

    Software Testing

    Startup

    Storage

    Unified Communication

    Web Development

    Wireless

  • Automotive

    Banking

    Capital Market

    Construction

    E-Commerce

    Education

    FinTech

    Food and Beverages

    Gov and Public

    Healthcare

    Insurance

    Legal

    Logistics

    Manufacturing

    Media and Entertainment

    Metals and Mining

    Pharma and Life Science

    Retail

    Sports

    Travel and Hospitality

  • CISCO

    Google

    IBM

    Microsoft

    Oracle

    Salesforce

    SAP

    ServiceNow

  • Business Intelligence

    CEM

    Cloud-based Planning

    Cognitive

    Collaboration

    Compliance

    Contact Center

    Contact Tracing

    Contactless Payments

    Corporate Finance

    CRM

    Custom Software Development

    Data Center

    Digital Signage

    Enterprise Architecture

    Enterprise Asset Management

    Enterprise Communications

    Enterprise Contract Management

    Enterprise Performance Management

    ERP

    Facility Management

    Field Service

    Fleet Management

    Gamification

    HR Technology

    IT Infrastructure

    IT Service Management

    Managed Services

    PLM

    Procurement

    Product Management

    Project Management

    RegTech

    Revenue Management

    Sales Tech

Menu
    • Retail
    • CISCO
    • Collaboration
    • Compliance
    • Contact Center
    • Healthcare
    • IT Service Management
    • Microsoft
    • MORE
    #

    Apac CIO Outlook Weekly Brief

    ×

    Be first to read the latest tech news, Industry Leader's Insights, and CIO interviews of medium and large enterprises exclusively from Apac CIO Outlook

    Subscribe

    loading

    THANK YOU FOR SUBSCRIBING

    • Home
    • Retail
    Editor's Pick (1 - 4 of 8)
    left
    AI becomes Personal

    Sherif Mityas, CIO & Chief Experience Officer, TGI Fridays

    Is Your Head in the Sand?

    Marc Kermisch, VP & CIO, Red Wing Shoe

    Laying a Foundation for the New-Age Retail Industry

    Paul Karras, SVP & CIO, Wilton Brands

    Driving a Performance Culture

    Paul Scorza, CIO, Ahold USA

    Discover the First Mile

    Ruben Martin, Co-Founder &CTO/ COO, Quivers

    The Missing Link for Retail: Closing the Loop between Point of Sale and Marketing

    David Inggs, CTO, VMob

    It all Comes Together in Retail.  In a World of Possibilities, Where to Start?

    Simon Kennedy, CIO, The Warehouse Group

    End to End Supply Chain Planning is the Need of the Hour

    Abel Correa, CIO, Arvind Lifestyle Brands Limited

    right

    Retail Is Detail They Say

    By Stuart Freer, Chief Digital Officer, Mecca Brands

    Tweet
    content-image

    Stuart Freer, Chief Digital Officer, Mecca Brands

    The problem with this statement, is that whilst it’s important to be in the detail, know everything about your business, it’s products and services and the customer, it often leads to what I have seen; analysis paralysis.

    “Show me a full business case and I will fund it”.

    What I have noticed, is the sheer fear of teams and leaders not getting out of their own way.

    Often, strangled by politics, position, power and team size, hampered by measures that drive the wrong behaviours; Sales instead of NPS, ROC instead of sales growth, Annual increases in budget envelope, rather than cost out, and so on.

    Why put the storage and compute team under one manager, when you've already been a VM Shop for 10 years and you're going converged or cloud?

    Creating documentation and monolithic PMO's to add control, when actually you add waste, cost and lose control, filling in forms and writing documents, missing the opportunity entirely. Why not move the data scientists to work closely the technology teams that build and secure the platforms they use, when you can create a divide instead? So, let's go back a step.

    How many times have you had a great idea? Your gut tells you it’s going be great for the customer, but you need to test it.

    You’ve spent two weeks building a pack of analysis, it’s involved time from other teams, who believe it and you just want to try it. The cost is minimal; in fact, the cost of the trial is less that the time taken to produce all of the documentation that you need to take to the investment committee, but you know the process, hunkers down and just go with it, because if you don’t, you have no chance. Finally, the paperwork is done, you’ve spent the final two days, checking format, grammar, spelling, capitals or not for the brand name. You submit the document for pre-read, one week out from the committee date, so you're now about four weeks in.

    The committee is here. You put on your best shirt, maybe a jacket, jeans and shoes. (You want that Digital Native look). You walk in confidentially; the committee has an air of Dragon’s den.

    Will you survive, or will you retreat, broken?

    The investment committee rejects the idea as they need a full business case. Let’s assume the role pays $100,000, that’s about $8,000 of time to produce the paperwork. Add in a few more people and you are probably up towards $20,000 of effort. This culture doesn’t support innovation, it prevents it. Stuart Freer is the chief digital and data officer of Mecca Brands. In addition, Stuart is an experienced C level leader and passionate digital evangelist having over 21 years of technology experience within retail and higher education in the UK and Australia.

    You don’t see Amazon or Google doing this?

    Now I am not saying, let everything happen, as the focus on the business can shift and resources can be wasted, but there any many great examples of innovation support. A business needs governance and good cost control, but governance can go too far. At Amazon, they have pioneered a Lean Canvas approach, no PowerPoint, but simply write down your idea, almost on a napkin, but in the style of the marketing pitch. What this does is, it stops you spending too much time on format and makes you reflect upon business value, what it really means to the customer. Writing a marketing pitch, forces you to step in the customers shoes.

    What’s in it for them?

    The other approach that I like is 20 percent time, the Google initiative of allowing you work on “Anything you want that will most benefit Google”. Now this could be seen as risky, a little outside of the norm, but the reality it’s where Google Apps (now G Suite) and Google cloud came from.

    So, how do you stop your company methods and culture strangling innovation?

    Some, have separated parts off. Woolies X (part of Woolworth’s Australia) for example have done just this, bringing to together, key online, technology, marketing and data businesses to solve these problems. Wesfarmers followed a similar path, by separating out the analytics and data science from its flybuys business into the Wesfarmers Analytical Centre.

    These are great at driving innovation, but the question is, “How do you bring this back into the broader business, to change the culture?"

    Ultimately it requires structural change, to set teams out in the right way. It requires effort to embed empowerment and a testing mentality. It often gets called failing fast, but it’s really about experimentation, trying ideas out, adjusting and trying again. Finally, it requires training on tools, techniques and mind-set. Agile fosters a short-term focus on value being delivered quickly, encouraging teams to learn, test and pivot, but the issue is, this can be a big shift for some. The Agile mind-set can be learnt, but it takes time. There are ways to encourage the change and I have seen this happen during a partnership with GlassRock Consulting and Peak teams.

    A process called “adventure-based training”, encourages the team to take, fast, calculated risks, by putting them in fictitious life or death scenarios. A bit far-fetched you may say, but what it does, is, it provides the team with limited data and limited time to decide a way forward.

    Move forward or fail

    They have to make a choice.Do you fly to base camp at a financial cost with reduced time and energy, or walk, consuming energy, more time, but less of your financial resources?

    You have 90 seconds to decide. This pressure drives clarity of decision making, focusing on the goal:

    Getting to the summit

    After Cloud training and agile training, this was my final formal training element. The team was left to self-organise, with the support of an agile coach.

    The result

    After sprint 0 (Building the DC on AWS) the team moved 18 applications to the cloud, including Active Directory. So it can be done, you can get out of your own way. All really makes for common sense, but they say “it’s not that common".

    I see this is an issue with business’s not adapting and taking a leaner approach. It’s an absolute must in today’s climate, with digital players, built on a simpler system, from nothing, taking a somewhat scrappy approach, jostling approach.

    tag

    Financial

    AWS

    Weekly Brief

    loading
    Top 10 Retail Tech Companies - 2020
    Top 10 Catering and Retail Technology Solution Companies - 2020

    Featured Vendors

    Fedelta

    Scott Buckham, Technical Director

    AOPEN

    Stephen Borg, CEO

    ON THE DECK

    Content Management System 2020

    Top Vendors

    Contactless Payments 2020

    Top Vendors

    Admired Tech 2020

    Top Vendors

    Corporate Finance 2020

    Top Vendors

    AI 2020

    Top Vendors

    Travel and Hospitality 2020

    Top Vendors

    Startup 2020

    Top Vendors

    Networking 2020

    Top Vendors

    FinTech 2020

    Top Vendors

    CRM 2020

    Top Vendors

    Scheduling Software 2020

    Top Vendors

    Education 2020

    Top Vendors

    Business Intelligence 2020

    Top Vendors

    PropTech 2020

    Top Vendors

    Salesforce 2020

    Top Vendors

    Big Data 2020

    Top Vendors

    Simulation 2020

    Top Vendors

    Product Management 2020

    Top Vendors

    Legal 2020

    Top Vendors

    Remote Work 2020

    Top Vendors

    Cryptocurrency 2020

    Top Vendors

    CEM 2020

    Top Vendors

    Insurance 2020

    Top Vendors

    Data Center 2020

    Top Vendors

    Banking 2020

    Top Vendors

    RegTech 2020

    Top Vendors

    Wireless 2020

    Top Vendors

    Procurement 2020

    Top Vendors

    Cognitive 2020

    Top Vendors

    Drone 2020

    Top Vendors

    HR Technology 2020

    Top Vendors

    HPC 2020

    Top Vendors

    Pharma and Life Science 2020

    Top Vendors

    SAP 2020

    Top Vendors

    Food and Beverages 2020

    Top Vendors

    Cloud 2020

    Top Vendors

    Blockchain 2020

    Top Vendors

    Cloud 2020

    Top Vendors

    Logistics 2020

    Top Vendors

    Augmented Reality 2020

    Top Vendors

    Contact Center 2020

    Top Vendors

    Oracle 2020

    Top Vendors

    Cyber Security 2020

    Top Vendors

    E-Commerce 2020

    Top Vendors

    Compliance 2020

    Top Vendors

    Enterprise Architecture 2020

    Top Vendors

    Digital Transformation 2020

    Top Vendors

    Manufacturing 2020

    Top Vendors

    Agile 2020

    Top Vendors

    CISCO 2020

    Top Vendors

    Field Service 2020

    Top Vendors

    Contact Center 2020

    Top Vendors

    IoT 2020

    Top Vendors

    Microsoft 2020

    Top Vendors

    Retail 2020

    Top Vendors

    Aviation 2020

    Top Vendors

    Healthcare 2020

    Top Vendors

    IT Service Management 2020

    Top Vendors

    Top Vendors

    Big Data 2019

    Top Vendors

    Digital Signage 2019

    Top Vendors

    Sales Tech 2019

    Top Vendors

    Startup 2019

    Top Vendors

    Salesforce 2019

    Top Vendors

    AI 2019

    Top Vendors

    Google 2019

    Top Vendors

    Smart City 2019

    Top Vendors

    FinTech 2019

    Top Vendors

    Admired Tech 2019

    Top Vendors

    Big Data 2019

    Top Vendors

    IT Services 2019

    Top Vendors

    Business Intelligence 2019

    Top Vendors

    Education 2019

    Top Vendors

    Project Management 2019

    Top Vendors

    Enterprise Asset Management 2019

    Top Vendors

    CRM 2019

    Top Vendors

    Data Center 2019

    Top Vendors

    PropTech 2019

    Top Vendors

    Capital Market 2019

    Top Vendors

    Travel and Hospitality 2019

    Top Vendors

    Legal 2019

    Top Vendors

    IT Infrastructure 2019

    Top Vendors

    Plastic Tech 2019

    Top Vendors

    Facility Management 2019

    Top Vendors

    Fleet Management 2019

    Top Vendors

    CEM 2019

    Top Vendors

    Sensor Tech 2019

    Top Vendors

    RegTech 2019

    Top Vendors

    Marine Tech 2019

    Top Vendors

    Collaboration 2019

    Top Vendors

    Software Testing 2019

    Top Vendors

    Facility Management 2019

    Top Vendors

    Automotive 2019

    Top Vendors

    Food and Beverages 2019

    Top Vendors

    Insurance 2019

    Top Vendors

    HPC 2019

    Top Vendors

    Wireless 2019

    Top Vendors

    Simulation 2019

    Top Vendors

    Corporate Finance 2019

    Top Vendors

    Drone 2019

    Top Vendors

    AI Healthcare 2019

    Top Vendors

    SAP 2019

    Top Vendors

    Procurement 2019

    Top Vendors

    Cyber Security 2019

    Top Vendors

    IBM 2019

    Top Vendors

    Construction 2019

    Top Vendors

    Logistics 2019

    Top Vendors

    Managed Services 2019

    Top Vendors

    Manufacturing 2019

    Top Vendors

    Media and Entertainment 2019

    Top Vendors

    Cloud 2019

    Top Vendors

    Banking 2019

    Top Vendors

    Agile 2019

    Top Vendors

    IT Service Management 2019

    Top Vendors

    Retail 2019

    Top Vendors

    HR Technology 2019

    Top Vendors

    Oracle 2019

    Top Vendors

    Cognitive 2019

    Top Vendors

    Compliance 2019

    Top Vendors

    Contact Center 2019

    Top Vendors

    Healthcare 2019

    Top Vendors

    Gov and Public 2019

    Top Vendors

    Microsoft 2019

    Top Vendors

    Pharma and Life Science 2019

    Top Vendors

    DevOps 2019

    Top Vendors

    E-Commerce 2019

    Top Vendors

    Blockchain 2019

    Top Vendors

    IoT 2019

    Top Vendors

    Metals and Mining 2019

    Top Vendors

    Gamification 2019

    Top Vendors

    Field Service 2019

    Top Vendors

    Augmented Reality 2019

    Top Vendors

    I agree We use cookies on this website to enhance your user experience. By clicking any link on this page you are giving your consent for us to set cookies. More info

    Read Also

    Pinpointing Weak Links in an Enterprise Security Chain: Helping Companies Battle Data and Content Security Challenges

    Pinpointing Weak Links in an Enterprise Security Chain: Helping Companies Battle Data and Content Security Challenges

    Hiro Imamura, SVP and GM, Business Imaging Solutions Group, Canon U.S.A. [NYSE:CAJ]
    Evolving Customer Relationship Management: Move Fast or Die Trying

    Evolving Customer Relationship Management: Move Fast or Die Trying

    Ed Ariel, Vice President of Service Operations, ezCater
    Importance of Customer Relationship Management Implementation

    Importance of Customer Relationship Management Implementation

    Drew Fredrick, Vice President, Home Building Technology, Clayton Homes
    How enterprise tech startups and corporates can collaborate for innovation

    How enterprise tech startups and corporates can collaborate for innovation

    Paul Santos, Managing Partner, Wavemaker Partners
    How an Initiative for Standardization and Modularization Leads to Cost Reduction, Increased Efficiency-and Better Teamwork

    How an Initiative for Standardization and Modularization Leads to Cost Reduction, Increased Efficiency-and Better Teamwork

    Faruk Bilgin, Global Director Manufacturing Engineering of Webasto Group
    Empowering the Retail Paradigm

    Empowering the Retail Paradigm

    Jason Williams, VP of Engineering, DICK’S Sporting Goods
    Fortifying the Retail Pardigm Amidst Uncertainities

    Fortifying the Retail Pardigm Amidst Uncertainities

    Vlad Yakubson, Head of Retail, yd.
    Journey from Intelligent Automation (IA) to Artificial Intelligence (AI)

    Journey from Intelligent Automation (IA) to Artificial Intelligence (AI)

    Sanjay Choubey, VP-IT, Briggs & Stratton
    Loading...

    Copyright © 2021 APAC CIOoutlook. All rights reserved. Registration on or use of this site constitutes acceptance of our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy  |  Sitemap |  Subscribe

    follow on linkedinfollow on twitter follow on rss
    This content is copyright protected

    However, if you would like to share the information in this article, you may use the link below:

    https://retail.apacciooutlook.com/cxoinsights/retail-is-detail-they-say-nwid-7394.html