BrainTrust Query: Why aren't retailers playing a bigger part in establishing industry standards?
I was privileged to attend a recent work session of the Association of Retail Technology Standards (ARTS). ARTS is sponsored by the National Retail Federation and supported through membership fees. It was obvious from these sessions that everyone in attendance felt they were making a contribution. (You try spending eight hours reviewing file specifications line by line.) Most of the attendees were employed by technology companies. The cynics would say they were hoping to steal technology or brainpower from their competitors. I think it was more an acknowledgement that no single technology does it all. The disconcerting thing, however, was the lack of retailer participation.
I constantly hear complaints from retailers about the way technology fails to meet their needs. The inflexibility of applications designed for a "perfect world" completely misses the realities of a retail operation, where things are fast paced and often done by the seat of the pants. Applications must be designed for the real environment of the store and be able to handle the human frailties that abound in the real world.
That's why the whole software industry is abuzz over Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). The challenge is that these services have to be developed with a vision of the business process model and the services it will contain. In order to avoid overlap between services developed by different organizations and the inability to support interfaces because of missing attributes, service developers must be designing to a common architecture of the business. One of the roles of ARTS is to develop just such an SOA blueprint. If anything, the need for standards is becoming more critical as retailers try to reap the benefits of SOA. SOA should allow a retailer to truly select "best of breed" for their various services and be able to integrate them into a coherent solution.
So why is it that so few retailers attend these sessions? The Director's feeling is that some organizations join up, get their documentation, then move on. They feel the documentation they receive by joining gives them a good start and that further participation is a waste of time. I don't know if that is the only reason, but it seems that without the existence of standards organizations and the participation of retailers we are doomed to keep reinventing the wheel.
Discussion Questions: What are the reasons you think there is not more retailer participation in standards organizations? What can the standards organizations do to change the domination of tech organizations at these sessions?
[Author's commentary] Besides the purely technical aspect of developing standards, there is the personnel factor. Yes, there is the possibility that someone might leave for another organization taking the understanding of processes with them. But there is a unique learning opportunity that comes out of filling a room with people all focusing on a specialized subject. By bringing people focused on retail technology together, organizations like ARTS make it possible for people from individual companies to find answers to complex problems. This is what is missed by the "hit and run" tactic of taking out a membership merely to get a copy of the documentation.