Collaboration, mixed skills and a robust infrastructure are at the heart of ensuring a retailer has excellent IT agility.

Watch the webinar

You can watch the Retail Week ICT Agility Webinar, with John Lewis and TalkTalk Business, on demand here. It’s free to view, you just need to register.

That’s according to Julian Burnett, head of IT strategy & architecture and head of business process at John Lewis, who was one of the panellists at Retail Week’s ICT Agility webinar.

The webinar addressed the idea that exploring the need for change in IT and data systems, and potentially overhauling legacy systems that are already in place, can empower retailers with the ability to facilitate faster, more flexible working and to accommodate ever-changing consumer demands.

However, a recent survey of 500 IT and wider business leaders from across sales, marketing and procurement departments, by TalkTalk Business, in association with analyst body Ovum, has revealed that 41% of retailers believe their organisation “under-does agility”, with a third directly correlating this to an over-reliance on fragile, inappropriate or legacy technology systems.

Retailers, such as John Lewis, are working hard to maximise their business agility while ensuring that it does not inflict fragility on key infrastructure systems.

Agility without fragility

For people in IT director, architecture and CIO-type roles, making the right IT investment decisions around both long term structural systems and smaller more agile systems are crucial to a retailer’s ability to fulfil both customer and business demands. The IT and data systems in place need to help an organisation move forward at a sufficient pace, while also ensuring it has suitably stable and secure systems to keep running, according to John Lewis’ Burnett.

Burnett added that this challenge can create tension about how to spend money, and that although the fundamentals of retail have not changed, and remain simple, the need to be agile is more complicated. He said: “I think the topic of ICT agility is somewhat germane to my job, day in day out. As an organisation we celebrate this year our 150th anniversary in business, and we also celebrate the 50th year of IT at John Lewis. Over that time frame of 50 years, we’ve invested repeatedly in IT solutions to fairly typical retail business problems and those problems have not really changed over the 150 years that John Lewis has existed. Retail is fundamentally quite a simple business. We buy stuff, we move stuff, we sell stuff. The complexity comes in the scale we operate at, and the accumulation of information, data and systems to support that scale over that time frame is quite considerable.”

Burnett added that agility in retail for those who are making IT purchasing decisions relates to keeping pace with the expectations of customers and staying ahead of competitors, which can be harder because of the established legacy systems that are already in place.

Also speaking on the panel, Paul Higgins, head of marketing at TalkTalk Business said that new retail entrants coming to market can be at an advantage because they don’t have legacy systems and technologies and instead can build on a blank canvas with the customer in mind immediately.

For those already established businesses, the panel was in agreement about the importance and ongoing relevance of the legacy systems and infrastructures that are in place. Burnett said: “The scale of operation that we have involves big technology. You cannot avoid the fact that you need big and substantive and complicated enterprise grade systems to allow you to do your business, and on the basis, that investment in IT is quite a costly affair, you don’t want to be replacing those parts of your underpinning IT that often, partly because actually when you buy or build something to perform that core function, it’s good for 20 years.” Smaller investment is also required for a business to keep up with customer demand, requiring a balancing act between frequent small scale investments alongside the larger long term investments.

Burnett said that the friction comes from making decisions such as where to focus attention, money and people to ensure that the right knowledge and expertise is in place for both big and small projects.

IT direct to consumers requires collaboration

Higgins said that modern developments mean that the IT service now extends into the home, direct to customers, whereas previously it stopped at the shop doorstep. He added that this fundamental change makes collaboration with departments such as marketing, over aspects including big data, more important than ever. He said: “The marketing team will always want more data, and I think that will provide huge stresses on the IT functions but I think fundamentally you don’t want to change those big, sometimes proprietary systems, because they are linked to 150 years-worth of business. What it says to us is that the infrastructure, which that’s landing on, is absolutely critical because you don’t want to change those proprietary systems because you are building them to last.”

Burnett added: “They are the building blocks of retail, we all need them, all retailers need a merchandise planning system, all retailers need distribution system, they all need a financial system, these things are the fundamentals of being a retailer.”

Agreeing with the findings of the TalkTalk Business and Ovum research, Burnett also said that collaboration is key. “Getting the right skills in the room and working together against a shared outcome really helps,” he said. “We say there are no such thing as IT projects, they are only business projects and that really does point to the fact that you need a composition of knowledge from IT specialists and business specialists and customers and finance experts and otherwise, and all to be playing a part in building incremental or significant structural change.”

The panel agreed that the infrastructure upon which a retailer’s fundamental software sits, as well as its more agile systems, also needs to be continuously renewed, which is now increasingly possible owing to the pace at which technology is reducing in cost and physical size.

Burnett added that technology integration is key to being able to unlock information and data from systems and maximise on its analysis.

While IT systems are being changed, so too is the IT function according to Burnett, with more skills required than ever before.

In fact, a recent survey of 500 IT and wider business leaders from across sales, marketing and procurement departments, by TalkTalk Business, in association with analyst body Ovum, revealed that 41% of retailers believe their organisation “under-does agility”, with a third directly correlating this to an over-reliance on fragile, inappropriate or legacy technology systems.

Talking about the findings, Ian Watt, principle consultant at Ovum said: “A majority of respondents were also dissatisfied with the speed of their organisation’s responsiveness in ICT terms, in particular larger companies. The time needed from request to results was perceived to be inadequate. Most respondents believed that allowing employees to contribute to strategic ICT decisions was good for agility, so broadening the discussion if you like. And in terms of game changers for ICT agility, there were two main ones, there was increased commitment among senior management generally to create an agile organisation and also simplicity - keeping things simple - was extremely important.”

Watch the webinar

You can watch the Retail Week ICT Agility Webinar, with John Lewis and TalkTalk Business, on demand here. It’s free to view, you just need to register.