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Priorities for Adopting an Exponential IT Mindset in Retail

Tuesday, May 21, at 1:00 PM ET | 11:00 AM PT

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Retail - Critical Projects

Deep Insights Tailored to Your Industry

1

Business-Aligned IT Strategy

Understand the capabilities and focus areas required to meet your industry’s needs and enable value creation.

2

Top Industry Trends

Identify resource, process, and environmental trends impacting your industry. Implement strategies to mitigate specific risks and take advantage of all relevant opportunities.

3

Industry Benchmarking

Reveal the true state of your IT services, processes, spend, and staffing levels to align your priorities and resources. Benefit from peer data to get a reference point for how well you stack up.

4

Core Industry Technologies & Software Selection

Arm yourself with everything you need to provide the right solutions to meet the needs of your business stakeholders.

1

Business-Aligned IT Strategy


Strategy Alignment
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Build a Retail Business-Aligned IT Strategy

This retail industry-aligned blueprint helps you:

  • Use Info-Tech’s industry-focused approach to discern the business context.
  • Clearly communicate to business executives the value IT adds to the organization’s key objectives and initiatives using the Strategy Presentation Template.
  • Make project decisions holistically by using Info-Tech’s Prioritization Tool to identify the most valuable initiatives to become part of the IT strategic roadmap.
Strategy Alignment
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Integrated Marketing With Generative AI

  • Gain valuable perspective for leveraging Gen AI within integrated marketing to capitalize on the sales growth productivity frontier.
  • Discover how best-in-class enterprises are using Gen AI and striving for more significant integrated digital marketing.
  • Realize the effects of Gen AI being felt by all entities within the integrated digital marketing ecosystem.
  • Strategize and prepare with business-aligned technology value outcomes to enable Gen AI–integrated marketing responsiveness and ramp up ROI.
Strategy Alignment
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What Does a Blockchain-Based NFT Loyalty Program Bring to the Table?

  • Identify opportunities across your customer to capitalize on the blockchain, NFT, infrastructure, and virtual environments to monetize key customer insights.
  • Realize the effects of digital loyalty programs that are being felt on all entities of the physical and virtual retail ecosystem.
  • Learn how the best-in-class retailers are already reaping business benefits from adopting technology demands with the holistic digital loyalty program.
  • Align the organization's business and technology modules in unison for your enterprise to design NFT loyalty initiatives to integrate into the digital business strategy.
Strategy Alignment
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Future of Retail Performance Monitoring Metrics

  • Identify opportunities across your channels and functions to capitalize on monetizing real-time key customer insights.
  • Realize the effects of new functions and operating models that are being felt on all entities of the physical and digital retail ecosystem.
  • Learn how the best-in-class retailers are now reaping best practice KPI variants to leverage across retail sub-sectors.
  • Visualize the future state of retail performance monitoring metrics for maturity realization with the opportunity to design a list of initiatives to integrate into the IT strategic plan.
Strategy Alignment
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Shopping in the Metaverse

  • Identify opportunities across your shopping journey to capitalize on the blockchain, digital twinning, infrastructure, and virtual environments to monetize key customer insights.
  • Realize the effects of metaverse that are being felt on all entities of the physical and virtual retail ecosystem. Learn how the best-in-class retailers are already reaping business benefits from adopting technology demands with the Metaverse Journey Map.
  • Visualize consumer, services, operations, and technology components in unison for your enterprise and industry use cases to design a list of initiatives to integrate into the IT strategic plan.
Strategy Alignment
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Leveraging AI to Create Meaningful Insights and Visibility in Retail

  • Identify how the best-in-class retailers are already reaping business benefits from adopting technology demands with artificial intelligence, etc.
  • Realize the effects of artificial intelligence that are being felt by all entities in the retail value chain.
  • Analyze the value chain to understand stakeholder pain points better and craft an AI or ML use-case around them to ramp up results.
  • Recognize cost and competitive opportunities across the enterprise to capitalize on the AI, ML, deep learning, and data science environments to monetize key customer insights.
Strategy Alignment
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Retail Industry Business Reference Architecture

  • Demonstrate the value of IT’s role in supporting your retail capabilities while highlighting the importance of proper alignment between organizational and IT strategies.
  • Apply Level 2 business reference architecture techniques such as strategy maps, value streams, and capability maps to design usable and accurate blueprints of your retail operations.
  • Assess your initiatives and priorities to determine if you are investing in the right capabilities. Conduct capability assessments to identify opportunities and to prioritize projects.
Strategy Alignment
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Building the Demand-Driven Supply Chain Network in Retail

  • Gain valuable perspective on the enablers for better visibility in the supply chain to capitalize on the network.
  • Discover how the best-in-class businesses are managing greater supply chain complexity while striving for greater network visibility.
  • Realize opportunities across your network to capitalize on the streamlined supply chain and deliver customer service excellence to monetize key customer insights.
  • Envision strategies and technologies effectively to become a more demand-driven, cost-responsive, and competitive network. Then design a list of initiatives to integrate into the IT strategic plan.
Strategy Alignment
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Discover the Building Blocks of a Unified Ecosystem

  • Identify opportunities across your ecosystem to capitalize on the suppliers, manufacturers, logistics providers, competitors, and other partners to monetize key customer insights.
  • Realize the effects of the unified collaboration that are being felt on all business entities of the open scale and emerging ecosystem.
  • Discover how the best-in-class businesses are already reaping business benefits from leveraging hyper-scale technology platforms in a unified ecosystem.
  • Envision consumer, services, operations, and technology foundational components in unison for your enterprise to design a collaborative list of cost and competitive initiatives to integrate into the IT strategic plan.
Strategy Alignment
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The Retail Store of the Future

  • Identify customer opportunities across their shopping journey then capitalize on IoT, store technology, infrastructure, and environments to monetize key customer insights and transform into a “smart store hub.”
  • Realize the effects of omnichannel that are being felt on all entities of the store and retail ecosystem. Learn how the best-in-class retailers are already reaping business benefits from adopting technology demands (instore and hybrid) with the Retail Omnichannel Framework.
  • Envision infrastructure components, cost, and competitive advantage creators in unison for your enterprise along with industry best practices and then design a list of initiatives to integrate into the IT strategic plan.

2

Top Industry Trends


Top Trends
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Generative AI Use Case Library for the Retail and Wholesale Industry

  • Discover generative AI uses as the first step in establishing the value in an accelerated fashion while encouraging executive buy-in.
  • Analyze the business capability map to prioritize AI use cases to increase the likelihood of benefit realization.
  • This material includes the use of:
    • Retail and Wholesale Business Reference Architectures
    • Internal and external AI use cases
    • Real-world case studies
Top Trends
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The Future of Omnichannel Retail

  • Identify: Strategic foresight flows from the identification of signals to clustering the signals together to form trends and uncovering what is driving the trends to determine which strategic initiatives are most likely to lead to success on an industry level.
  • Prioritize: Further customize the scores by tailoring the generalized weightings to your organization and determining the relevancy and timing to your operations. By doing so, your enterprise can determine which trend and technology to prioritize for your retail omnichannel initiative.
  • Align: After establishing what trend and technology to prioritize, establish its benefits that closely align and promote the success of your business’ goals.
Top Trends
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Retail Improved Customer Experience Trend Report

  • A retailer must meet their customers’ constantly changing expectations for product selection, ease of purchase, delivery, performance, and price through various channels.
  • Understanding these expectations is essential to retail planning and execution.
  • Learn about how an improved customer experience affects both your organization and IT specifically, including challenges and opportunities, with expert assistance.
Top Trends
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Retail Secure Personal Information Trend Report

  • Retailers collect a lot of personal information which must be protected from inappropriate external and internal access.
  • As attackers adopt changing techniques, retailers cannot assume that what was sufficient protection before is still adequate now.
  • Learn about how the secure personal information trend affects both your organization and IT specifically, including challenges and opportunities, with expert assistance.
Top Trends
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Retail Better Data for Decision Making Trend Report

  • The right decisions around pricing, product mix, amount of inventory, and customer profile can make the difference between success and failure in a very competitive retail environment.
  • The ability to provide timely and accurate data is challenging for IT departments, which must deal with obsolete data and/or lack of data ownership.
  • Learn about how the Better Data for Decision Making trend affects both your organization and IT specifically, including challenges and opportunities, with expert assistance.

3

Industry Benchmarking


Peer Benchmarking
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Benchmarking Report: A Cross-Industry Comparison of IT Stakeholder Satisfaction

  • Every industry has unique characteristics that can hamper progress or facilitate success in satisfying IT stakeholders. Reimagine your strategy by shifting the definition of who your peers really are.
  • Discover which industries achieve high stakeholder satisfaction across 13 core IT services.
  • Learn the characteristics that different industries have that can help or hinder IT success.
  • Understand what your industry has in common with others that you can leverage to improve stakeholder satisfaction and overcome your own institutional barriers.
Peer Benchmarking
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Retail IT Management & Governance Benchmarking Report

  • Understanding your IT team’s perception of what’s important and how well they’re doing is central to identifying strengths, weaknesses, and potential misalignments with business priorities and expectations.
  • Learn about how IT departments in your industry assess the importance and effectiveness of 45 IT processes to gauge your own alignment and identify select processes for targeted improvement.
Peer Benchmarking
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Retail IT Staffing Benchmarking Report

  • Many IT departments are already running lean, struggling to keep pace with never-ending demands from the business.
  • By taking the IT Staffing Diagnostic and participating in our unique IT spending benchmarking program, you will gain critical information to understand how to position your IT team to be more effective.
Peer Benchmarking
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Retail IT Stakeholder Satisfaction Benchmarking Report

  • IT leadership needs to understand where their clients are unsatisfied with the quality of service they are receiving from IT.
  • Current areas that Retail IT struggles with stakeholder satisfaction include innovation, client-facing technology, analytical capability, and security – all of which are tied to Retail’s ability to compete and thrive today.
  • Understand important focus areas to address and insights into how your team compares with other Retail IT organizations.

4

Core Industry Technologies & Software Selection


Core Industry Technologies
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Assortment Planning and Management Report

A strategic view of retail planning and intelligent assortment management processes and systems improves customer choice and profitability.

Core Industry Technologies
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Retail Point of Sale Systems Technology Report

  • A modern point of sale (PoS) system has many features and capabilities that can optimize operations, enhance customer experience, and assist in selling through various sales channels. This makes them very complex.
  • Learn about what PoS systems are, the state of the market, key features and functions, and leading vendors in the space in order to understand how they can transform your IT strategy and ability to deliver.
Core Industry Technologies
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Retail Enterprise Resource Planning Technology Report

  • Modern enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems have a lot to offer in automating processes, reducing the amount of manual routine work, and facilitating the flow of information across business units.
  • But ERP projects are long, complex, and costly initiatives that result in massive changes to the way people work.
  • Learn about what ERP is, the state of the market, key features and functions, and leading vendors in the space in order to understand how it can transform your IT strategy and ability to deliver.
Core Industry Technologies
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Retail Web Experience Management Technology Report

  • E-commerce is the fastest-growing of all retail channels and demands the deployment of advanced technologies.
  • Merging with web content management and analytics, web experience management (WEM) is evolving from basic websites to an omni-channel experience.
  • Learn about what WEM is, the state of the market, key features and functions, and leading vendors in the space in order to understand how it can transform your IT strategy and ability to deliver.

Latest Retail Notes

Short, tailored research notes aimed at providing you with timely insights, relevant to your industry. Hot off the press, these notes will be published regularly and pair great with your morning coffee.

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Meet the Manufacturing Sector Executive Services Leadership Team

Date published

November 7, 2023

Authors:
  • Chris Goodhue

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Manufacturing is big business for Info-Tech, and so is our dedicated Manufacturing research and advisory services team’s ambition: Ensure that our members in manufacturing companies consistently receive exceptional value from their investment with Info-Tech! We do that by providing material, ongoing support for IT leaders in manufacturing on key IT initiatives, personal/professional development, peer networking, and career advancement.

The Future of Omnichannel Retail – Executive Brief

Date published

August 11, 2022

Author:
  • Rahul Jaiswal

Read this concise Executive Brief to learn about the six key trends that will help drive retail digital transformation and how omnichannel affects all functions of an enterprise.

Baking Cybersecurity Into the Cannabis Industry

Date published

September 25, 2018

Author:
  • Kate Wood

The cannabis market is undergoing explosive growth in all directions. Traditional strategic approaches to information security are unlikely to keep up in an era of frenetic start-ups, investments, innovation, mergers, partnerships, and acquisitions. Agile cybersecurity will be the key to competitive advantage.

Incorporate Video Analytics in Business Intelligence

Date published

September 24, 2018

Authors:
  • Larry Fretz

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Advances in video surveillance technology are now opening up the possibility for organizations to leverage video data for business intelligence. This note will briefly touch on the new technologies in the space, such as heat mapping, dwell time, and people counting, that are allowing businesses to better understand their customers.

Amazon.com Embodies Innovation as a Business Model and You Should as Well

Date published

August 10, 2017

Author:
  • Scott Bickley

This Premium Research Note provides an inside view into how Amazon.com drives continuous innovation by leveraging a singular core business model that guides all key decisions related to how the business is run. Innovation is not simply a product of a small subset or “chosen few” within an organization, but instead springs from strong and accurate guiding principles upon which the business is anchored.

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