Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

It’s much easier to find a mobile marketing platform today than it is to find a POS package that has highly integrated mobile marketing. It’s much easier to build an omni-channel approach across your retail, online and call-center outlets by swapping data between these systems than it is to find a single system that meets all the needs of these areas all at once. And most importantly, it is much easier to replace a single retail technology platform if its data feed to the enterprise has been normalized and can easily be customized by the new vendor.

If you think about your current to-do list with retail technology, how much of that list is related to business function needs (“we want the system to be able to do this new thing”) versus accessing, changing or reporting on data (“we want a report that shows us how many widgets we sell online versus retail”)?

Information and data requirements make up a large part of any retail technology RFP. The problem is that they are typically too broad (“we need to be able to show executives a dashboard of how awesome this new technology is”) or too narrow (“we need to be able to see how many widgets we sold online versus retail”). If you set up an infrastructure where those data needs could easily change over time by manipulating the data “someplace else,” you are more likely to achieve future success. This applies to both on-premises and cloud-based approaches.

You need to consider data portability critical even if you don’t see an immediate need today. I know many retailers are looking to find vendor-partners to take this headache off their plates, and they don’t want to build in requirements that say they may someday want to do some of this themselves. Worse still, functional silos within the retail enterprise often hide the problem (and potential answers) that data portability solves. And vendors aren’t always chomping at the bit to reduce the value of their application to the business function it plays.

But with the convergence of social, mobile and retail technologies we are experiencing, the ability to “glue together” several different vendors through a robust information architecture will become critical as this space gains maturity. The technology and the vendors are changing so rapidly in this space that placing a hard-to-reverse decision on any one technology or platform could be very hard (and costly) to undo, just ask the restaurants and retailers who invested in the Gowalla platform.

Now that’s not to say there is not a place for the larger players who offer a multi-faceted retail technology framework that covers many or all of the retail technology stack. Although my approach may seem like a no-brainer for the folks who are building a best-of-breed retail technology stack, I would also argue that it helps the framework players. You may love 95 percent of the framework but worry about its ability to deliver on new and emerging technologies fast enough. Make sure your data is portable, and that will enable you to integrate smaller components into the framework where it makes sense.

So when you start putting your requirements together for your next retail technology decision, make sure you prominently feature data portability. Make sure the vendor has a clean and easy way to extract that data from its system and, if possible, an API for you to reference. Oh, and make sure to drop “future proofing” on your executive team as a way that you are helping to protect your retail technology investments. They love that stuff.

What do you think? If you disagree (or even, heaven forbid, agree), please comment below or send me a private message. Or check out the Twitter discussion on @todd_michaud.