Retail Democratized

Okay, we know new technologies have opened up incredible opportunities for m-commerce and social retailing. The stats are overwhelming. But I wonder: How many of us also understand the impact they are having on enterprise solutions?

First of all, I am amazed at the pace of m-commerce and social retail adoption, going from near zero to mainstream in less than a calendar year. This is not an easy thing to do, especially during a recession. If the impact of the phenomenon rested on this alone it would be huge.

But when you combine m-commerce with social retailing and Web 2.0 technologies, and then fold everything into an enterprise solution, say into a merchandise planning dashboard, then you arrive at a new paradigm in running a retail business.

Duncan Angove, general manager and senior vice president of Oracle Retail, calls this paradigm "democratized retail," and demonstrated how it might work at the recent CrossTalk user's conference.

I wrote about the democratization of retailing in this space in March 2010, drawing a parallel from Apple's recent launch of the iPad. Steve Jobs had just made the iPad announcement and the Twittersphere buzzed with 129,000 Tweets in the first half hour, followed by Web posts, blogs and digital community postings in massive numbers. The avalanche of activity completely overwhelmed what Jobs had to say, and illustrated that traditional levers of marketing control are fading, even within the four walls of a store. This is what is meant by democratization or, put another way, customer empowerment.

But there is another side to the phenomenon that is just as important, a vision that harnesses these forces and embeds them within core retail solutions. The result is a transformation of workflows and processes, allowing customers to be brought into the merchandising process, extending collaborative creation throughout the organization, delivering solutions anywhere/anytime via mobile devices, harnessing social media sentiment to shape marketing plans, leveraging e-commerce data across departments in real time, and creating a distributed portfolio of analytics to make more intelligent decisions up and down the application layer.

Was everything Angove demonstrated fully baked and ready to roll out in 2010? No. But he showed how it could work in front of 120 retailers plus analysts and press. This clearly means it is on Angove's horizon line, and what an exciting horizon it promises to be.