Imagine a World

Omni-Channel retailing seems to be all the rage these days - aligning assortment, centralizing inventory and providing a seamless customer experience. However, there are a number of interesting startups that are innovating beyond the current Omni-channel paradigms (March 2013)

The growth of Social Media has elevated identity, privacy and big data to become vital topics for CIOs and CMOs of online businesses. Looking deeper into legislative, consumer and technology trends, I see the challenges for the post-digital organization as: Privacy, Ownership and Persistence. 'Rock, Paper, Scissors' provides a handy metaphor to describe the challenges faced by post-digital businesses. (January 2013)

Why would a retailer care about the semantic web, surely this is just another technology fad that the IT department can distract itself with instead of delivering faster transaction systems or more accurate and up-to-date reports? Not so. If fact it turns out semantic technology may enable robust solutions to your retail business users' most pressing problems. (December 2011)

I've spent the last 10 years messing with someone or other's data and helping turn it into shareholder value - from multi-national Fortune 100 companies to tiny bootstrapped startups and with full-scale Enterprise Business Intelligence to just a few guys and a machine-learning algorithm in the cloud. There's a common thread running though the most successful cases - these are the companies that really nailed it. (November 2011)

After 12 years spent as a Product Manager working for Enterprise Software, Startups, blue-chip retailers and financial services companies and advising many more, I have been able to boil it all down to one key skill - the ability to say 'No'. This post explains why 'No' is the one word that product managers need to be able to say with authority and comfort knowing that it will be well received (October 2011)

Retailing has been with us for as long as we can remember. Aggregation and Comparison Sites are today's drivers of traffic and how consumers search for products. Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) has yet to take off bringing the ability for consumers to interact with vendors of products. Do retailers need to behave more like aggregators, particularly as they grow their marketplaces? How are retailers gradually and perhaps unconsciously beginning to adopt VRM practices?
(July 2011)

The Retail industry continues to evolve, shaped by the business environment, advanced through technology and at the whim of global tradewinds. Whether it is consumers that initiate the change or that retailers force change upon the consumer can be debated, but it is the change that is inevitable. The question is what will those changes look like? (May 2011)

According to this article on BargainBabe.com it is possible to trick the airlines into giving you a cheap flight by getting off the plane at a layover point. In an age of Security Checkpoints, Data Mining and Social Networks the implications of this could be deeper than you might guess (May 2011)

What happens when you reverse the marketing funnel and you allow a consumer to specify exactly what they want? So a merchant or manufacturer would be able to go to the market and ask 'who is looking for this item at this price at this location?' and will obtain a list of qualified buyers. A number of ideologies and start-ups are taking advantage of web-technology to allow consumers to publish their needs and wants - will the end-result be a new breed of electronically enabled 'middle-men'? (April 2011)

I'm feeling a little like Goldilocks and her porridge at the moment - some of the explanations are toooooo complicated and others are tooooo simple - and nothing was just right... and then I found it - so just wanting to share. (February 2011)