Article

Is your store ready for tablets? Three steps to help make the decision

Develop a meaningful application strategy before you even look at hardware and software.

May 1, 2011

There is near-frenzied talk today about opportunities for integrating tablets into business and enterprise environments, with more than 65 percent of Fortune 100 companies taking the initiative, including Best Buy, Lowe's, Home Depot, J.C. Penney and Nordstrom.

Couple that with the expected three to 4 percent rise in retail IT spending in 2011, and you may be asking yourself if tablets are a smart move for your retail business. Before you engage an app developer or digital agency, or put expensive new hardware in your associates' hands, make sure you have a clear sense of the purpose, presentation and performance aspects of your tablet initiative.

It is helpful to take yourself through the following three steps: 1) Identify the applications which will have maximum impact on your business, 2) determine the right tablet platform and 3) walk through all required deployment and back-end integration steps.

First and foremost, it's about the application. Retailers should have an application-driven strategy that assures tablets are indispensible to store associates. For instance, how are you aiming to use the tablet on your sales floor? How will it be an improvement over current practices? Do you require experiences where associates turn the screen toward the customer? Will the tablets need to work offline? All these factors impact the application's UI and architecture, branding treatment, hardware requirements, enterprise integration and more. All choices flow from your application goals.

While on the subject of applications, it's worth noting that in-store apps have been historically segregated, with kiosk or mobile-based apps designed for shoppers, and enterprise applications geared for store associates. In contrast, tablets make it easy to blur this distinction and create a new world of opportunity.

Yes, an associate carries the device and it is loaded with all the enterprise apps you would expect, but it can easily be shared with the consumer to help them visualize a solution, solve a problem or address a need. The fresh opportunity for retailers is the stunning shared applications, which can be brought to the sales floor at the lowest cost of all time. Footwear retailer Puma is using iPads to help customers design their own shoes, while J.C. Penney will give customers access to ring styles, cuts, sizes and metals through the device. With camera integration, retailers will have a host of opportunities to integrate customer photos with apparel and cosmetic options perfectly suited to their styles, shapes and skin tones. The possibilities are truly boundless.

Second, identify the appropriate platform — iPad, Android devices, Blackberry PlayBook, HP's TouchPad or (eventually) Microsoft. You want your platform decision to be lasting. Let's not forget that around 1980 the Radio Shack TRS-80 led the PC market, with IBM PC clones and Apple each holding miniscule share. These are early days in the tablet market, and CIOs looking at wide-scale deployments need to be very cautious.

One strategy is to initially focus on Web applications that will run on any tablet through the browser, thereby avoiding the risk of developing apps for one tablet platform that may be second best next year. Apple has an early lead in design, ease of use and developer participation, but don't discount the open platform strategy of Google, and never leave Microsoft out of any discussion, particularly when so much of a retailer's existing infrastructure is likely based on Windows technology.

Third, have a plan for deploying the devices and integrating with your back-end infrastructure. If you've considered the iPad, you'll know that Apple has been reproached for their lack of enterprise features and support. However, they've come a long way in developing enterprise solutions, which you can uncover from the iPad Business Resources page. They now provide a host of resources for corporate deployment, such as rolling out enterprise apps centrally to a fleet of iPads, sending user policies and settings broadly, and the kind of centralized management that administrators have come to expect in the PC world. This is a great place to start if you're evaluating how the iPad might settle into your infrastructure.

Developing a long-term tablet strategy must also put enterprise integration at the fore. Eighty to 85 percent of a retailer's IT budget is dedicated to multi-year deployments, ongoing services and maintenance of solutions deployed across multiple networks and stores. So, tablets will have to play nice with these projects at your company. On the other hand, a staggering 41 percent of retailers find their ecommerce infrastructure to be severely limited, so integrating tablets may be easier said than done. Each retailer will need to assess what is possible and choose the approach that best leverages existing investments.

As always, the ultimate question is one of money. CIOs need to determine not just if tablets are the right long-term mobile solution, but which applications and which tablets will create value, and even whether their existing kiosk or in-store PC investments still have relevance. Needless to say, with the right strategy and a thoughtful approach, you'll ensure your tablets are money well spent.

Troy Carroll is CEO of Intava, a provider of interactive retail technology. (Photo by Grant Robertson)