Retailer leaders will drive Digital Transformation, according to IDC Retail Insights

New IDC MaturityScape helps business and IT executives identify improvement areas in the digital transformation journey

FRAMINGHAM, Mass., July 19, 2016 – As today's consumer has come to increasingly expect more convenience, ease, and a compelling shopping experience, retailers must reexamine their business strategies. IDC Retail Insights provides retailers the tools for a digital transformation journey in the new report, IDC MaturityScape: Digital Transformation in Retail (Doc #US40169816),

"Digital transformation requires a top-down study and redesign of business strategy/leadership, business processes, human engagement (workforce and others), information monetization, and technology. It is more critical than ever for retailers to adapt experiences delivered to ever-changing consumer needs and to be agile and innovative, leveraging all of the advantages of current-state digital systems," said Leslie Hand, vice president, IDC Retail Insights.

This report offers retail leaders five disciplines of digital transformation — Leadership DX, Omni-Experience DX, WorkSource DX, Operating Model DX, and Information DX — so retailers can accelerate their adoption of these disciplines, and realize the benefits. This IDC MaturityScape for digital transformation in retail will enable retailers to:

• Assess their overall level, or stage, of digital transformation competency and adoption.
• Have a set of talking points and retail industry insights to guide the conversations among business, digital, and technology executives in their organization.
• Identify areas of opportunity in their ecosystem for digital transformation.
• Understand the challenges and opportunities of digital transformation.
• Start creating the road map and framework for a digital transformation.

"Retailers must recognize and drive digital transformation. Retailers dealing with legacy, disconnected, siloed systems have latencies and speeds that cannot support modern commerce, nor do most of the legacy systems allow retailers to quickly launch the types of services that customers today are expecting. At a time when customer expectations are rising and customers are more digitally fluent and digitally equipped than ever before, customers are expecting that their shopping experience will be easy, convenient, frictionless, and available anytime everywhere," noted Robert Eastman, research manager, Retail Omni-Channel IT Strategies at IDC Retail Insights.

About IDC MaturityScape

IDC MaturityScape reports are used by IT executives and their enterprise partners to have a structured way to identify their current level of maturity, and the gap between where they are and where they want to be to maintain competitive balance or achieve industry superiority. Using IDC MaturityScape is a way to reduce the friction of change, to make more precise investments, and to identify the details of governance, process, technology, organization, and other factors that can derail the best-laid technology initiative.

About IDC Retail Insights

IDC Retail Insights assists retail businesses and IT leaders, as well as the suppliers who serve them, in making more effective technology decisions by providing accurate, timely, and insightful fact-based research and consulting services. Staffed by senior analysts with decades of industry experience, our global research analyzes and advises on business and technology issues facing the retail industry. International Data Corporation (IDC) is the premier global provider of market intelligence, advisory services, and events for the information technology market. IDC is a subsidiary of IDG, the world's leading technology, media, research, and events company.