A BUSINESS CASE
FOR TRANSFORMING
RETAIL IT
WHITE PAPER

CONTENTS
1

Executive Summary

2

Background

4

The IT Delivery Model

9

Conclusions

10

About Logic

11

About the Author

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

In today’s retail business market, the challenge of delivering

The amount of consolidation in the ERP vendor space

and supporting a consistent and comprehensive set of

has gone beyond most everyone’s predictions. There are

application solutions across the enterprise has become

fewer ERP solution providers today than there were ten

overwhelming and can be quite costly. The complexity of

years ago and the larger ERP solution providers have

the technologies demands specialized talent to select,

dramatically expanded their base retail offerings with

deploy and support these solutions. In retail this has

critical acquisitions in POS, Ecommerce, CRM, Order

served to redirect the focus of many IT organizations

Management and Business Intelligence. Today, there

away from the activities that are most important to

are only a handful of ERP solution providers with the

the retail business: product development, supply chain

breadth and maturity of offerings adequate to run most

management and customer selling. Instead, these IT

retail operations.

organizations are focused on managing the “infrastructure” end of the retail solution delivery stack and dedicating enormous amounts of discretionary spending (both Opex and Capex) to keep these solutions viable.

At the same time, the pace of acquisition in the ERP solution space has far surpassed the ERP solution provider’s ability to properly merge these technology solutions in a timely way, continuing to stymie attempts

In an attempt to better manage their delivery capabilities

by retail CIO’s to reduce their cost of