Collaboration Experimentation

Collaboration provides the background and the conceptual framework for the community to work together and the members of the community provide the drive to experiment.  This is the starting point for the collaboration community to first come together and then to grow and produce value to the community members.  The community is a key factor to the success and the benefits achieved by the members.  The community also provides the framework for the members to define and then achieve the benefits that bring value to the individual members.  This is one of the key reasons that the collaboration community concepts and practices are growing in acceptance.

The key underlying value of a collaboration community is the harvesting of benefits across the community members.  What I mean by this is that the community and collaboration generates a great number of benefits that bring value to the community and allows a greater consumption of the value.  The results of the efforts from the collaboration bring a great deal of benefits and while some of these benefits may not be valuable to all members, the likelihood of members getting value from these outlying benefits is greater in communities that are larger and more diverse.  These benefits derived from the consumer collaboration community follow the same formula and process as the benefits derived for a supplier collaboration community.

In the case of a consumer collaboration community the retailer invests time and skills to bring together the technology framework for the community with the expectation that it will achieve customer retention and also first hand experience with new concepts to support the demands of the consumer.  The consumers come to the community with the expectation that they will be provided with a place where they can learn and share new methods for product use and also a place where they can socialize with other consumers to increase their efficiencies and cost savings in shopping.  You can see that the desires from one group of members are delivered from the investments of other groups of members.

The key achievement and objectives delivered to the members of the community is a much higher and greater efficiency in resource utilization.  This requires the members to expand their viewpoints and expectations for the collaboration community in order to harvest the full range of benefits that can be achieved.  For many retailers this is a cultural change to identify the potential benefits available from the community and more importantly to accept the concept that the combination of benefits will bring a greater value than any one specific hard benefit that may be achieved on their own.

And now for the audience participation portion of the show…

ECommerce will have wide ranging impacts on both the retail and manufacturing sectors.  How can you focus these abilities to improve the consumer's experience?  Improving the consumer’s experience will require a re-evaluation of the sales channels, the manufacturing channels and practices and the supply chain channels and practices from the raw materials to the consumers’ homes.  In order to ensure and maintain success in this new reality you must harness the tools and capabilities in many new areas.  How can you support these continuously changing requirements?

Collaboration Test Bed

Every organization strives to develop and maintain an applications and technology test bed that allows new releases, modifications and systems patches to be validated prior to migration to the production, or ‘live’, environment and retailers are no different.  Many, if not most, organizations struggle with developing and maintaining a conceptual test bed to be used to validate concepts and this is probably the most valuable test bed to deploy, especially for organizations such as omni channel retailers that interact directly with the consumer.  The concepts and interaction with the consumer is the most contentious interaction driving by a breathtaking pace of discontinuous change.

The consumer interaction is continuously bombarded with new tools, services and demands that make it very confusing and difficult for an organization keep up with the pace of the change.  Sometimes it seems that new tools and services arrive on a weekly or even daily basis and then to confuse and make the job of evaluation and incorporation even more difficult consumers themselves then morph the tools and services in ways that sometimes are not recognized from the original offering.  This makes it very difficult for the retailer to develop and maintain a strategy, sometimes I think the best strategy is simply ‘embrace change’.  With all these factors swirling around the retail environment how can the retailer maintain their place with their targeted consumers?  

This is where the collaborative community comes into play to provide a test bed stage to experiment with tools and concepts when they are available through the cloud.  This test bed provides an isolated environment for the retailer to engage both new tools and services along with the consumer experimentation.  The greatest value will be derived from this collaborative test bed by encouraging consumers to interact and engage the site with a general focus and direction of developing a consumer community of uses and suggestions for the retailer’s products.  The site provides the retailer with the ability to experiment with tools and also encourage the consumer to experiment with new services and concepts in shopping.  This experimentation concept is important to the retailer’s ability to grow and retain the consumer interest.

In general, the majority of the retailers have never been known of bleeding edge, or even leading edge, technologies.  The cost and margin generally involved in the retail environment preclude heavy investment in new technologies as experiments.  This collaborative consumer community that is based on the tools and services available from the cloud provides a cost effective manner to achieve two important objectives; a test bed to experiment with new concepts and a method to maintain consumer interest that encourages consumers to return to the community.  This community concept provides the greatest value opportunity because of the encouragement for consumers to return, a sales site encourages consumers only when they are searching to purchase something while the community encourages the consumer to return to interact with others.

And now for the audience participation portion of the show…

ECommerce will have wide ranging impacts on both the retail and manufacturing sectors.  How can you focus these abilities to improve the consumer's experience?  Improving the consumer’s experience will require a re-evaluation of the sales channels, the manufacturing channels and practices and the supply chain channels and practices from the raw materials to the consumers’ homes.  In order to ensure and maintain success in this new reality you must harness the tools and capabilities in many new areas.  How can you support these continuously changing requirements?

Integrate Cloud Technology

A major reason, or benefit, for integrating cloud technologies and services into your consumer collaboration community is the opportunity to experiment in a sandbox environment with the consumer.  The community provides the perfect sandbox environment for this experimentation because it is outside of the commerce architecture so it will not impact the sales and yet it has the consumer interest and activities in the environment to flex and test out the technologies and services prior to integrating into the commerce architecture.  This test bed concept is a key aspect of every lifecycle and in this example the retailer is simply utilizing another platform to open the validation to the external consumer.

The community can provide you with a platform and framework that supports a quick turn around to implement new functionality without directly impacting the business critical sales platform.  This also will provide the  platform to support a progression from the conceptual to business value.  The challenge that I see with the cloud technologies and services is one of validation and integration to the existing business services.  Utilizing the collaborative community as this testbed platform provides both immediate and long term value; the immediacy of trying the service or technology and the long term of a process to move into the business value platform.  

This framework provides a method, or process pipeline, to quickly test new and changes features and software as it is released into and by the cloud.  The retailer could never analyzed, introduce, test and then migrate to the sales platform the volume of features and technology that is available and constantly growing and changing in the cloud.  The collaboration community, however, provides the platform to experiment with the technology and features to gauge and validate with the consumer the potential value prior to implementing in the sales platform.  

This process and utilization of the collaboration community as a testbed provides the business with the method and framework to quickly roll out new feature and functionality in a manner that allows a widespread trial.  The cloud technology cost model combined with the testbed platform of the collaborative community can provide an extremely effective process, or pipeline to quickly integrating new features and functionality into the sales platform.  The retailer may find that very few features and functionality available in the cloud will actually work in the sales platform after running through this experimentation process.  The beauty of this framework and process though is that the retailer does not need to invest a great deal to realize the results.

And now for the audience participation portion of the show…

ECommerce will have wide ranging impacts on both the retail and manufacturing sectors.  How can you focus these abilities to improve the consumer's experience?  Improving the consumer’s experience will require a re-evaluation of the sales channels, the manufacturing channels and practices and the supply chain channels and practices from the raw materials to the consumers’ homes.  In order to ensure and maintain success in this new reality you must harness the tools and capabilities in many new areas.  How can you support these continuously changing requirements?