Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

In a perfect world, that wouldn’t be necessary. (Neither would worrying about associates walking off with merchandise.) And for many retail IT execs, it’s more than a little uncomfortable. Using CRM data and mobile phone signals to stalk customers online or even in-store is one thing. Verging on creepy, maybe, but still in bounds. Using it to manage fellow employees, well, that’s very different.

The fact that retail IT is willing and even eager to monitor customers in real time—exactly what and how much they buy, what path they follow in the store or the mall, which competitors they’re visiting—but shy away from putting store managers under the same type of microscope says everything about that unpleasant reality. You know that a lot of retail IT is about surveillance—about watching what people are doing. You’re just a bit queasy about who’s under the microscope.

There’s an irony here. Consider a little boutique shop, where the owner knows half the customers by name and can usually spot an inventory item that’s out of place because she knows what has been sold and how many items should be in each stack. That store owner doesn’t need much technology to watch everything like a hawk—including how well associates and the store manager are doing their jobs. In reality, they’re all under surveillance. The store’s survival depends on it.

A big part of the job of retail IT is bringing that level of visibility to chains. That’s the point of POS systems that update inventory with each transaction, inventory systems that trigger orders and dashboards that let executives see everything that’s going on. And it should be the point of item-level RFID—not just to track what inventory is doing but to track how well associates and store managers are doing their jobs, too.

You may not like calling it surveillance. But whatever you call it, your chain’s survival depends on it, too.