Big Data And Collaboration

Retailer collaboration practices with consumers has usually been focused at the personal, and in person, level through the employee interaction with their customers.  This must change with the changes introduced by the omni market and the explosion of the social network aspect and capabilities and especially the embrace of this technology from by consumers.  These demands can be especially difficult if the retailer attempts these efforts without a means to analyze the reactions and the interactions with the consumer. This is where the big data practices and capabilities come into play and these capabilities can be utilized to provide the consumer reactions that were captured in the past from the personal and direct one on one interactions with consumers.  Big data can be utilized to produce the analytics and provide the means to explore consumer reactions through their direct reaction and interactions with the omni market technologies.

This is a coming together of technologies and interactions between consumers and the retail marketplace.   These technologies have exploded in the marketplace with new capabilities and interactions on a daily basis, it seems, and the retail marketplace has been incorporating much of these technologies as a result of consumer direction and demands.  The difficulty for retailers lies in their abilities to incorporate these capabilities into their procedures and practices which requires a robust and flexible framework to support the required integrations and interactions. However the benefits can be priceless for these consumers because of the data these technologies and consumer interactions can produce.

Technology improvements has produced the tools and the foundational hardware to support the collection of huge amounts of data to quickly and efficiently analyze the data to answer the questions that will support direct consumer collaboration.  As a result of the advances hardware technologies the big data capabilities can now support the amounts of data collection required to analyze consumer shopping and purchasing practices in the retail omni marketplace. The challenge now for retailers is to understand and embrace the capabilities, while at the same time incorporating new technologies and capabilities to support consumer shopping demands in the retail omni market.  

This is the single greatest challenge for retailers now and probably the single greatest opportunity to support their collaboration efforts with consumers.  The retail omni market produces huge amounts of data based on the consumer direct interaction with the technology and the omni market practices and capabilities of wireless technologies provide the means to support seamless interaction across all channels, also producing huge amounts of data.  All of this data availability will do no good for the retailer without big data technologies and this technology requires expertise and imagination to analyze the data.

These are challenging times for many of the large legacy retailers because of the velocity of change demanded by consumers and the retail omni market.  Layer on top of this the requirement to understand and then plan for changes and the challenge can become almost overwhelming. Big data technologies and analytics will add to this complexity and challenge on the one hand and then on the other hand these technologies will provide the knowledge based on factual data collections to help the retailer succeed and navigate the demands from the market.