Franchisees Force A Show-Me Attitude
Written by Frank HayesRetail CIOs have enough trouble keeping their own line-of-business executives and managers in line while trying to enforce IT edicts among employees who would rather ignore them. But when corporate CIOs move from a traditional chain to a franchised one, they suddenly discover how good they had it before. Line-of-business employees may try to ignore those rules but, ultimately, they’ll have to comply.
Not so with franchise owners. They paid their money for their stores, and they need to be convinced that a particular IT investment makes sense. Tell them they need to upgrade POS to collect more data for projections, and they’re likely to respond, “That’s to help you, not me. You think these upgrades will be so helpful? Fine. You pay for them.” That perspective forces CIOs to have arguments that speak to the benefit of the individual store, and it’s the topic of StorefrontBacktalk‘s monthly retail payments column on S1’s blog.
-Marc
December 8th, 2010 at 12:30 pm
It’s a really valid point Frank – Your Brand/Their Money. Having built a cloud-based International Retail Brand Platform from the perspective of the users (e.g. Franchisees), adoption has been very strong because they can see straight away “what’s in it for them”. International is often the poor cousin to Domestic in a Retail Brand’s world but Retailers such as M&S and Gap are now reaping the benefits of the cloud over traditional IT – enabling user-friendly collaboration to optimise “the franchisees spend on their brand”