Collaboration Control Tower Framework

The control tower concept and capabilities will help to drive the retail omni market to new heights and capabilities to support the increasing velocity of change.  This collaboration control tower will also require a robust framework of distributed management and also more importantly distributed data management, storage and analytics to support the requirements of a distributed collaboration control tower.  This will be a huge challenge for the partners in this collaboration control tower and will also require a strategy to continuously evaluate both capabilities and demands on the retail omni market to ensure that the control tower is maintained to meet the potential and also continue to provide value to all of the partners.  This must be viewed as a continuous improvement and maintenance exercise that will continue to grow in capabilities and value.

It is critical for this collaboration control tower fromework to be developed as a distributed framework that is flexible to support the current demands and that  is robust to support the increasing demands for interaction and analytics. The greatest value of the collaborative control tower is the connectivity to partners and the data that can be shared by the partners to improve analytics to identify and support strategic initiatives to support the retail omni market.  The types of analytics and the value provided by the results of the analytics is only limited by the imagination of the partners and the data made available by the partners.

The challenge though in developing the control tower framework is the acceptance and embrace of the concepts by the partners involved and the interaction of these partners with each other and the customers with whom they interact.  This means that partners must embrace the collaborative practices and also accept the concept of change that drives the consumers and the retail market. It is impossible for any one partner in the retail omni market to be able to go it alone in this new market because of the velocity and volume of change that drives the market now.  This velocity and volume of change requires that the partners collaborate in order to both understand and meet the demands. This also requires that the partners change their culture form one of control to one of collaboration or these partners will fall by the wayside because they simply cannot keep up with the volume and velocity of change.

These changes are in the early stages of identification, acceptance and implementation currently in very early stages of recognition.  This will grow over time into a tidal wave that will overrun retail market participants that refuse to embrace the model. While this will start small with a few visionaries I expect that this will grow over a very short period of time as more retail market participants recognize the difficulty meet the demands and weigh against the ability to survive on their own.  Timing of this new wave may be questionable however I believe that the tide will quickly change as success grows with the collaborative control tower. The biggest hurdle to the change though is the framework supporting the collaborative control tower and the framework is also probably one of the easiest requirements to meet.