Sometimes it is Really All About Technology

By Joe Skorupa
By necessity, CIOs have become well trained in communicating with non-IT executives. To avoid being viewed as a technophile instead of a broad-minded team player, CIOs say things like, “It’s not about technology, it’s about…(Insert productivity, efficiency, sales, profits, growth, benefits, etc.).”

But to paraphrase Sigmund Freud, sometimes technology is just technology. (Freud said, “A cigar is just a cigar.”) The current boom in tablet adoption, if I may be so bold to say it plainly, is all about technology. In other words, it’s all about a perfect tool filling gaps, solving problems and, yes, delivering benefits.  

If tablets aren’t a perfect tool then they are the next best thing, based on the rush by retailers to deploy them. To quote Greg Buzek of the IHL Group: “The adoption rate of tablets in stores is happening faster than any technology I have ever tracked.”

Data from RIS studies and other sources indicate that virtually every retailer with store formats that justify tablet deployments (and not all do) will invest in them by the end of the year. That is a remarkable finding.

There have been other perfect tools introduced into retailing. Barcode scanning technology, for example, and POS systems come to mind. But each of these took 15 years to roll out through mainstream retailing. The Internet took more than 10 years for most national chains and large regionals, and some would argue that the numerous high-profile website crashes indicate many still don’t take the online channel seriously. Even m-commerce on cell phones and smartphones is still in its infancy five years after the introduction of the iPhone.

To be sure, tablets are in their infancy, too, but the rollout in retailing is occurring at warp speed on two fronts: 1. Store-level projects to better serve customers and 2. Customer-facing projects to tap into couch shopping through tablet-friendly sites and apps.

The rise of the latter trend is giving momentum to the concept of T-commerce (for tablet commerce), which is worth tracking because recent data suggests it is the fastest growing segment in the mobile channel and has the highest conversion rate as well as the largest average market basket size.

CIOs have many ways to justify tablet initiatives for their organizations, but underlying them all is the simple truth that tablets are a great technology.