It's time to stop trying to plan out IT needs for an entire year at budget time and let IT scale and shrink to meet changing business demands. Smart retail organizations will give the CIO the tools necessary to solve the problems at hand, rather than trying to make sure no one runs with scissors. Surely, every CIO out there wants to be given the responsibility and accountability to fix things, without having the "we don't trust you" strings attached.
Amazon is eating the lunch of brick-and-mortar retailers for one simple reason: It invests in its business in ways that traditional retailers don't. Some brick-and-mortar retailers are unwilling to upgrade systems that are 10 years old, and Amazon spent three-quarters of a billion dollars on a robot company to further refine its warehouse efficiencies. If that doesn't say it all, what does?
