#cloudbasedretailsolutions

Recently, we did multiple reference calls for a client looking for a full platform of cloud-based retail solutions and a common comment we heard throughout these calls was, “whatever you have budgeted for Change Management, double it!”. One retail CIO, followed up “sorry, let me correct myself on my previous statement, triple that budget.”

There are multiple factors that drive change in retail Information Technology (IT) projects, but all require changes in the retail systems (processes, people, and technology) to be successful. These collective changes and how they are made to the system can be called Change Management. When moving any Retail solution to a Cloud environment, whether SAAS (Software as a Service) or PAAS (Platform as a Service), Change Management will take on even more importance as any out of the box solution will be built on Retail Best Practices.

With that said, a challenge is that most Tier 1 and 2 Retailers will have 10% to 20% of their current operating processes that are not based on Best Practice. In such instances, if the Retailer is looking to migrate to a pure “Out of the Box” deployment, they will have to create new retail processes and redeploy people.

Lastly, Cloud computing allows system integrators/consultants to be more agile in deploying/recommending functional improvements, however it requires a consistent change management process that is not discarded after initial implementation.