Communication before implementation

One well-respected retailer has argued that complex systems are making life more difficult for his industry. But the problem that most businesses with underperforming systems actually face is the lack of communication between their operational and technical staff.

Last week’s technology opinion piece was from Retail Week’s guest columnist Simon Burke, the chairman of Majestic Wine and Irish grocer Superquinn. He argued that retail systems are so complex that getting them to support an initiative is often the hardest task.

In particular, he pointed out that Superquinn has not been able to respond to Marks & Spencer’s meal deal offers as it would have liked, because its till system isn’t up to the job of doing a mix-and-match bundled price discount.

But is this really down to systems that are too complex, or systems that haven’t been properly specified?

Burke rightly noted that retailers need to be able to adapt to market changes on literally a weekly basis. The most successful systems deployments in retail that I see are the ones where there has been close involvement from the staff who will actually be using them.

IT staff often complain that their users don’t know what they want, or change their mind halfway through an implementation. This can often come about because the implementation team isn’t asking the right questions.

Users will nearly always tell you they want a new system to perform exactly like the one they are using already. In fact, what they want is a system that can do everything they already do now, but can also quickly and simply allow them to do other things that they haven’t yet thought of. Unfortunately it is down to the IT department to get them to admit this.

Systems that aren’t up to this task aren’t too complex, they are too inflexible. Building flexibility in to a system can make it very complex, but this should be invisible to the user. If the underlying architecture of the system promotes flexibility, then this can help to overcome the issue of users who can’t articulate their future needs.

Simon Burke is right to point out that systems can stifle commercial innovation – but it doesn’t have to be this way if technical innovation leads to systems designed to evolve at the same speed.