How to accelerate retail digital transformation by connecting silos

Ever felt like you’re trying to understand your customer by looking through a keyhole?

Ever built a new system only to find out another department had that data all along?

If you’ve answered yes to either of these questions, you've got silos!

Silos typically stem from internal misalignment of goals and priorities. This is what we have learned from discussing the topic with retail business leaders at a recent Retail Hive conference coupled with experiences from our past projects. Despite this misalignment, company’s internal funding processes often permit teams to independently implement diverse solutions to address their specific needs, adding to the problem.

Structural issues may further exacerbate the problem. When different departments operate in isolation, applications and data tend to follow suit, resulting in standalone systems with overlapping functionality. Unfortunately, these solutions are introduced without due consideration for their impact on the overall customer experience or the broader strategic goals that could be achieved by combining data and operational methods.

This lack of collaboration, while understandable, leads to the formation of business and data silos—disconnected repositories of information. This places unnecessary limits on the value of your data. Informational isolation can even breed distrust, as teams fight to preserve their own data and limit interdepartmental transparency.

Instead, you need to break down silos and accelerate retail digital transformation by fostering collaboration and synergy across the entire organisation. In this article we’ll discuss how you can do that.

So, how should retailers tackle these challenges?

We believe that the answer lies in connecting, not breaking silos. A multi-disciplinary approach with a shared vision is crucial for retailers to gain a holistic view of their business, improve decision-making, and enhance overall efficiency.

In times of crisis, silos may be tackled rapidly, but how can we replicate this behaviour in non-crisis times, enabling businesses to proactively respond to ever changing market conditions? Let’s take a look.

Key steps to boosting retail digital transformation by connecting silos

As our team helped several clients tackle organisational and data silos, we have identified five key steps retailers can take to begin this process and accelerate digital transformation efforts.

1. Establish a common vision and objectives

First, leadership must create a common vision, establish key objectives, articulate the challenges associated with realising those objectives, and employ a cross-disciplinary approach to reaching them. 

This not only ensures that resources are invested into initiatives that will drive the desired change, but also helps employees develop empathy and understanding of what other departments need so that they can collaborate more effectively.

3. Outline your current data architecture

Once you’ve reviewed the data flows inside the company, you should create an overarching view of the existing data architecture and governance processes.

Clarify who the data owners are, assess the quality of your metadata, and highlight where inefficiencies, gaps, and synergies exist. Evaluate and outline how the data you have could be used to drive better understanding of your customers and your organisation.

5. Conduct business change readiness assessment

Finally, don’t forget to perform a business change readiness assessment based on the key factors that will impact your ability to break down silos. Typically, these factors are:

• Culture
• Psychological readiness
• Team risk tolerance
• IT infrastructure
• Employee skills and availability
• Change capacity

Once the assessment is finished, develop and implement a plan to improve company readiness prior to making the actual changes. At this point, identifying advocates to communicate the required changes across the organisation will be key.