At the Retail IT Summit, there has been little talk about technology and much talk about business need, culture, processes and customer demands.

Yesterday was the first day of the Retail IT Summit, and the openness of the presenters and barrage of questions from the audience showed how important it is for retailers to talk to each other.

IT conferences can often be a little dry. But the number of acronyms coming from the mouths of the presenters, and the number of questions coming from the audience, was the opposite to what you normally find.

IT directors were giving out information on their budgets as a percentage of their sales, the capital and operational expenditure cuts they have faced this year; as well as being honest about some of the mistakes they have made when trying to manage major development and change programmes.

And some of the questions coming from the audience were just as telling to the pressures that IT departments currently face. Retailers who weren’t sure if they are getting value for money from outsourcing, retailers who wanted to know how to measure a project’s progress, and retailers who wanted to know how long the return on investment in a major software development was really going to take all stuck up their hands.

At the same time, there was very little talk about technology; and much talk about business need, culture, processes and customer demands. While there is something to be said for keeping quiet about IT successes that create competitive advantage, it’s also clear that major project failures benefit no one — they give the IT functions in all retailers an undeservedly bad name.

The retailers in the room at the Summit yesterday get that, and it was great to see so many sharing for the common benefit of them all.

  • For a write-up of all the themes and issues raised at the Retail IT Summit see next week’s issue of Retail Week magazine.

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