Most retail companies today have built their technology infrastructure over a long time with multiple teams only to have it virtually unchangeable where it takes forever to update or change anything. This is similar to a cruise ship where it takes a mile to change course.
With retailers needing to change course on a dime, they need
a model more like a speed boat. This
model is a Unified Commerce Architecture. There is a self-paced course
explaining the details at https://www.converselink.com/collections/all/products/retail-technology-architecture
Here is a very brief discussion of the components of this
Unified Commerce Architecture. The end
goal is to allow your customers to shop in whatever way they wish, in store or
mobile. This puts the customer in charge
of their own retail experience anytime, anyplace.
To make a wholesale change would be way too expensive and
probably end up in bankruptcy. So how
does a retailer start the move?
First a retailer needs to understand exactly what part of
their world needs changing. This would
be their value chain(s) that is related to their business strategy. To identify their value chain(s) the retailer
needs a business process model.
Having identified their value chain(s), the retailer needs an
infrastructure flexible enough to support the addition of a new microservices architecture. Special attention should be paid to security,
privacy and cloud computing. Retailers
need to Identify what parts of their value chain are appropriate to put into a
secure cloud and what parts they wish to keep local and private.
Once the retailer has a plug-n-play architecture in place,
they need to break their monolithic application into sets of
micro-services. Simply speaking, a
micro-service is a small piece of functionality that can be maintained
separately from the entire application.
It can be modified and re-installed without impacting the entire
application. This give the retailer the
ability to change course on a dime or to quickly fix problems before they
seriously impact the retailer.
A key micro-service is a retail database. When retailer A buys retailer B, the people
at the top need to understand how their new company is doing. Having a common retail database gives them
that knowledge.
In today’s world, data comes from all over the place. This leads to another key component – the
Internet of Things. The Internet of
Things allows the retailer to cross-correlate information that hasn’t been
available before. This is going to lead
to all kinds of new opportunities for the retailer while optimizing operations.
Every vendor thinks their communication messages are
correct. For them they probably
are. However a vendor can call something
an item and another can call it a product.
Both are referring to the same thing.
To solve this the retailer needs a canonical message model to
communicate this information to everyone who needs it.
Now one has common data and common messages, the retailer
needs a way to send this information around the company. This is where the
choreography architecture comes into play.
Without going into detail, there are basically two styles, either a
request/response model or a publication/subscription model. Whatever is chosen enables the value chain
applications across the enterprise to easily communicate.
In total this leads the retailer to a Unified Commerce
Architecture that is easy to update, easy to extend and respond quickly to
whatever the customer desires.
There is a retail technology architecture self-paced course that
lays out the foundation for creating this retail architecture. It doesn’t provide a single architecture but
identifies and discusses alternatives in short 15 to 20 minute
presentations. In a couple of hours, the
student will have a firm grasp of the variables involved in creating a modern retail
unified commerce architecture.
By: Richard Halter
(405) 376.1141
President, Global Retail Technology Advisors, llc
