I loved my days on the shopfloor, interacting with customers to showcase the latest product, projecting the quality and craftsmanship involved in its production.

I loved my days on the shopfloor, interacting with customers to showcase the latest product, projecting the quality and craftsmanship involved in its production, engaging with staff to stir them up to be proud of what we were achieving and the opportunities our brand gave us.

The years have flown by and, since moving into a business-facing role where we still try to make the customer experience as enjoyable and seamless as possible (some also call it consultancy), I find myself moved by an utterly captivating stimulus: data. Yep, I said data.

My inner geek was uncovered when I recently went on an investigative trip to India. Moving beyond the call centres and page production capabilities I had my epiphany.

It wasn’t just me either. My fellow explorers were blown away by the academic but very hands-on approach to data analytics. What is the collective noun for geeks?

We entered a huge, modern building in Bangalore, buzzing with what looked like students on a campus. Everyone moved at pace and with purpose - no dawdling allowed.

Whisked to an upper floor we moved through an open-plan office with hundreds of young people all huddled together poring over laptops, getting excited about what the screens were presenting.

We then entered a room with four young men, eyes bright and engaged. I asked for their backgrounds and was blown away by the number of MSCS, PhDs and MAs in the room.

They took us on a data analytics journey of what they do now and the possibilities in the future for how companies can use them to supplement each and every business function.

What struck me was that there were 2,500 buzzing and highly qualified data geeks there, who live, breath, love analytics (and I now count myself among their fraternity), who pore over numbers in order to establish trend, movement and patterns.

They don’t just deliver graphs and tables but they tell you what it means. They call it ‘so what’. It is up to the retailer then to do something about it - to act on the information or, as they put it ‘what now’. Unfortunately, that model, to that scale and level of capability, could never be replicated in the UK.

Imagine a retail world where tills poll on a Saturday to draw a curtain on the trading week and the information is ported over to India where the data squirrels do their thing and feed back to the business by 7am on a Monday -
so no hours of scrutiny and analysis by swathes of product-focused merchandisers, buyers and planners throughout Monday.

They are presented with the so what and it is their job to get on with the what now. Trade, merchandise, plan - drive sales. That is one example of myriad potential.

A tsunami of talent and opportunities beckons in the new world, which we should explore and embrace. Data is the new oil and it is amazing what can be unlocked by utilising resources on a global scale.

As one of my esteemed colleagues put it, data is geek porn and, unashamedly, I count myself as its number one fan.

  • James Doyan, managing director, Athito Retail