October - 2022retailtechinsights.com8IN MY OPINIONOver the past few months, the COVID-19 pandemic has had an immense impact across the global economy; no industry sector has been untouched for better or worse. In Retail, it has accelerated the need not only to be digitally available to our customers but also to detect changes in customer behavior more quickly than many in the industry were used to. The underlying technology, data, and organizational and people skillsets necessary to "tune" our companies to the rapidly evolving consumer behaviors that are a result of the pandemic, are actually the same as we ought to have been pursuing anyway. As our customers' lives have become further centered around their digital devices and assets, they have become much more purposeful in where they spend their time and attention, and the brands that are not quick to pick up and ultimately predict where this is will only meet their customers like a broken clock meets the correct time twice a day.Across the technology, data, and skillsets, I will stick to more general platitudes as the underlying tools, languages, and platforms are constantly evolving.For technology, the most important piece is to have a platform that is flexible and robust enough to handle all of your important 1st and 3rd party data in a way that will allow your tools and data scientists to take advantage of the innumerable relationships between all of the features these data sets may have. It must be flexible in that it can scale with your companies needs from a pure storage and ingestion capability. It must be robust enough to handle computational needs, varied ingestion sources, and, with the increased regulatory need and ethical duty to properly handle consumer privacy, provide clear data lineages. Any attempt to build such a platform needs to understand minimally: current needs of the business, planned future needs, and at least an idea of future "dreams." What I mean by future "dreams" is to ask your data science leaders, your strategy teams, your innovation groups, "Despite not having any formal plans or budget dollars assigned at this point, over the next 5 years, what are some projects you are not doing that you think would be beneficial to the company based on where you currently see our customers headed and what would we want to ensure we have in our platform to address these as we built out/expand?" For data, the point is concise: clean, governed data. The actual creation and maintenance of healthy datasets is the By Sean MacCarthy, Executive Director Global Analytics and Store Segmentation, Claire's Inc.The Retail and Consumer Landscape may Change, but our Purpose asRetailers does not
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