Analytics Key to Disruption

The retail marketplace has developed a robust set of tools to support consumer purchase and delivery over the years providing a solid framework of tools and capabilities that can be combined in many ways to support consumer demands. Now it is important to focus the same kind of attention and effort to develop and support the tools that will allow the marketplace partners to sense the change and respond to the demands of the marketplace. In my opinion, analytics tools and data collection is the key to the ability to sense change and demands and as such provide the key to navigating and responding to the disruption that is rocking and will continue to rock the marketplace. Analytics is truly the next frontier and provides the key to addressing and reacting to the demands for change and interactions.




The disruption will continue and increase in velocity and the change will be focused on collaboration and integration of marketplace services with the consumer. A contributing factor to this integration and collaboration will be services and internet tools that are growing in numbers and capabilities to provide new consumer services and tools that will naturally require integration with omni market shopping and purchasing. These tools and services themselves while driving change into the market are also producing a huge amount of data that can be harvested for analytics by the smart marketplace partners. This is where the smart partners will focus because this data provides them with a goldmine of information and capabilities to sense and respond to the marketplace. This is why assistant software is so important to companies like Amazon, Google and Apple not only does the assistant engage and lock the consumer to the assistant, the assistant is also collecting data specific to the consumer for analytics.




We are now entering an age of analytics as a tool to navigate the velocity and force of disruption in the market. I think this is a bit of a chicken and egg question because I believe that as much as analytics enhances the understanding and the how to address the change, I also believe that the analytics is also driving change to new depths and capabilities because of the types of analytics and the data available and utilized in the analytics. In other words the analytics is actually creating new change and disruption because of the types and breadth of the analytics performed.




Analytics are not only the key to navigating and surviving disruption, the analytics practice and framework is also driving the disruption in ways that were not available just a few years ago. In addition the analytics of the future will also be dramatically different in a few years as well. Analytics is a practice that people will improve with use and addition of data, however, analytics is also much more than just a practice. Analytics is truly the key to disruption; not only sensing and responding to disrupting change but more importantly driving disrupting change into the market. This is truly a practice that must be started and invested in for the future and partners must start immediately so they are not left behind. The velocity of change and disruption will not allow time for waiting to settle, the settling of change is really the introduction of the next change and as a result there can be no waiting to follow the lead.