Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

As assistant director of information systems for the $700 million Piggly Wiggly grocery chain, Rachel Bolt has been one of the most vocal proponents of biometric retail authentication systems. At Piggly Wiggly, that system—like almost every other retail biometric system being tested today—is based on fingerprints. But although Bolt saw initially strong consumer interest and support for the system, that support has lately seen a serious drop. Read more...

Catching misleading statements and half-truths in vendor news releases takes me back to my old days of covering New Jersey politics.

It was never news to say that a particular New Jersey politician was a crook. The news was when they slipped up enough to let you prove it.Read more...

The conventional IT thinking has been that, all else being equal, consolidated and centralized is the most efficient way to run a business. All of the data is analyzed globally and purchasing trends can be quickly spotted and acted on. Read more...

Joe Chiavetta was facing a potentially huge hardware purchase to keep his always-on-the-road sales force current with pricing, orders and customer backgrounds. It's not what a food distribution company's chief financial officer likes to think about. It then struck Chiavetta that the device the reps were already using to check voicemail—their cell phones—could also include small customer databases for the 200 or so prospects that each rep works. Read more...

Retailers who have tried selling wines next to the canned plums and the greeting cards have grown frustrated. The high-margin beverage is bathed in its own language, leaving non-wine-schooled consumers drunk with confusion.

One retail software company tried to deal with this situation by introducing a kiosk that uses a sophisticated form of 20 Questions to establish the consumer's wine preferences by asking about everything from their coffee, soda and salt preferences to the nature of the occasion. Read more...

The National Security Agency, whose NSA initials are typically preceded by "super secret" or a similar cool-sounding phrase, is known as the home for code-breakers extraordinaire.

After 9/11, the NSA was given even more freedom to do whatever it takes to track terrorists and identify their plots. The New York Times recently reported about their efforts to conduct more domestic surveillance without warrants or any court authorization. Read more...

Betting that price comparison sites will play an increasingly prominent role in e-commerce, credit information vendor Experian was spending almost half a billion dollars to take over PriceGrabber.com.

Following on the heels of the June 2005 purchases—just days apart—where E.W. Scripps paid $525 million for Shopzilla and eBay paid $620 million for Shopping.com, Experian's move seemed to continue a trend. Read more...

When two major food companies—select H.J. Heinz food operations and Del Monte—merged a few years ago under the Del Monte umbrella, it forced Del Monte CIO Marc Brown to do some radical consolidation. Almost 100 systems were eliminated and the combined company standardized on ERP, data warehouse and a very different approach to supply chain. Even telecom advanced, with a huge push for voice over IP. Read more...

Several Web sites have popped up—like the thermometer timer on a turkey—to announce to the world Black Friday retail specials before the retailers want them to. Is this nature's way of telling the retailers to grow up?

Old ways die hard, and there's no industry that is more resistant to change than retail. Read more...

The $10 billion combined gambling empire envisions a future of RFID-wearing cocktail waitresses and slot machines smart enough to pay off the important gamblers first. When multi-billion companies are involved in an acquisition with 100,000 employees and more than $10 billion in combined revenue, executives typically must use statesman-like diplomatic phrasing to show that both sides are valued equally. But with the fierce backdrop of Las Vegas and casino giants Harrah's and Caesars, little is typical. Read more...

The Virgin Entertainment Group is trying to push the envelope on kiosk use, with plans to use the multimedia machines not just to play video clips, audio samples and game demos but to identify customers and to handle payments. "Our minds are racing where we can go with this," said Robert Fort, the CIO for the 17-store chain with some 1,600 employees and $225 million in annual revenue. "Virgin is definitely a company known for innovation and our demographic may indeed be much more willing to participate in all of this stuff." Read more...

A high roller walks into the casino, ever so mindful of the constant surveillance cameras. Wanting to avoid sales pitches and other unwanted attention, he pays cash at each table and anonymously moves around frequently to discourage people who are trying to track his movements. After a few hours of losses, he goes to the cashier and asks for a cash advance off of his credit card. The card tells the casino his name, but not much else. As is required by card issuers, the cashier asks for some other identification, such as a driver's license. Read more...

Privacy arguments tend to be emotional, often expressed in terms of "security versus privacy."

A book about the future of RFID goes far beyond that. The authors of Spychips do not hesitate to go for the emotional jugular frequently, using references and examples from the Bible, the Nazis, the Russian government and the George Orwell classic 1984. Read more...

TMasterCard International Inc. Vice President Oliver Steeley is working to make contactless payment available to millions of Americans. Contactless payment is where a customer authorizes a charge to a credit card without the credit card being touched, often by using a key fob, a smart credit card or a chip embedded in something else (such as a cell phone or wristwatch). The authorization is sent to a reader wirelessly, from which it is then communicated to a POS (Point of Sale) unit, which might be a significant distance away. Read more...

Several indications—from reduced ATM interest, increased use of online bill payments and sharply improved consumer bank perceptions—show that banks are starting to understand their customers. Given that it's a business where almost everything comes down to moving numbers from one column to another, one might think that online banking should have been one of the first e-Commerce segments to mature. From that perspective, it's an Internet natural. Read more...

With 1,200 stores in 47 states, the Cold Stone Creamery chain is growing quickly with its do-it-yourself ice cream concoctions. But the acting CIO is trying to whip those do-it-yourself treats into a corporate CRM sundae.

The managers at one of the nation's fastest-growing ice cream chains pride themselves on customers who know exactly what they want sweet-wise when given the tools to make it. Read more...

SAP AG officially made its countermove to Oracle Corp.'s retail efforts with the announced purchase of Canadian POS player Triversity. Not coincidentally, the deal—which had been in the works for almost two months—was announced the day Oracle's OpenWorld conference opened.

Financial terms of the deal were not announced, nor were the revenues of privately held Triversity confirmed. Read more...

TSAP and Oracle are fighting a marketing battle that recalls the grand days of vaporware. By making acquisitions to fill product holes, instead of filling product holes, they promise to deliver a solution that is greater than the sum of its parts. But retailers need to wait months and years to see if it pans out. The software industry has for years had a proud tradition of announcing product long before an actual product existed—vaporware, in other words: software specs and capabilities that didn't really exist but might exist in the future. Read more...

The most altruistic gift is an anonymous contribution, in which a giver wants to help but does not want to benefit from the donation. Sometimes, though, anonymity is not possible, and that's where things can get dicey. Read more...

When Emcor Group CIO Joe Puglisi recently decided to upgrade his company's version of Lotus Notes, he quietly "pre-deployed" it with a cross-section of his company's business managers. He plans, he said, on using the favorable comments from that group to act as a sort of viral marketing to make the upgrade come as more of a customer desire than an IT demand. Read more...

It has been said that CIOs at large companies today have limited direct power and—more than almost any other C-level executive—need to push the IT/business agenda by persuasion and by maintaining good relations with other stakeholders. Taking that to heart, the CIO of Overstock.com recently sent off a note to key business partners taking the heat for a wide range of technologies that weren't working out. Read more...

Typically, a CIO arguing for a $30 to $40 million IT investment for new payment systems has to answer a lot of questions from a skeptical CEO, chief financial officer and board members. But that wasn't the experience of Canadian Tire Corp. CIO Andrew Wnek. Read more...

The Overstock.com Web site is all about pricing, as it pitches itself as saving consumers as much as 80 percent compared with other retailers. But in its rapidly growing IT department, the obsession is speed. How fast? During a major deployment of some large Teradata packages—including CRM, profit analytics and an enterprise data warehouse—Teradata bid on the assumption that such large installations typically take between nine and 12 months to deploy. Overstock's IT department finished the deployment in 70 days, said company CIO Shawn Schwegman. Read more...

In the Information Age that we're in, quality of information trumps quantity every time. And for CIOs, that's good news. But there's a big piece of bad news, too. The flood of information at the command of customers is both good and bad, and many customers—especially consumers—rarely can tell the difference.Read more...

The CIO of Reitmans needs sales associates to know a customer's history before the sale starts. Given that most customers use loyalty cards at the end of shopping, that's a tough sweater to pull on. In the retail world, selling clothing is mostly about convincing customers what looks good on them. And it certainly helps if the salesperson already knows what's in that customer's closet, what her favorite colors are, her price range and her size.Read more...