Evan Schuman's StorefrontBacktalk

Franchisee Columnist Todd Michaud has spent the last 16 years trying to fight IT issues, with the last six years focused on franchisee IT issues. He is currently responsible for IT at Focus Brands (Cinnabon, Carvel, Schlotzsky’s and Moe’s Southwestern Grill).

Make no mistake, the number-one challenge IT teams will be faced with over the next five years is helping their business partners extract meaningful information from the yottabytes of data being shoved into their archives. And when I use the term “meaningful information,” I define it as information used to create action.

We are at the dawn of an age where great companies will figure out how to successfully combine operational, marketing, customer service and social media data sources into systems and tools that enable the business. These firms need to clearly define their Information Supply Chain. Companies that don’t figure it out will be left out in the cold.

Take Starbucks, which has just added its ten-millionth fan on Facebook. This stat is making marketers everywhere drool with envy. I can’t help but wonder if this stat is just a cool big number or if it is part of an integrated “customer relationship management” strategy.

Is each one of those fans in coffee retailer’s CRM system? Is the company able to track the purchases of each of its fans? Can it easily correlate the impact of poor store operations to customer sentiment? Does Starbucks market specific offers to customers based on their social graph (giving better deals to those who are highly connected versus those who are not)? Has the company assigned a value/score to each customer that helps guide its marketing efforts?

Does Starbucks know if a Facebook user is worth more than a Twitter follower or a 4-Square Mayor? Can it Tweet out specific, location-based in-the-moment offers on items that are overstocked or about to go bad (a 2010 version of the manager’s special)? Can the company tie the pages that people surfed on the newly free WiFi service back to their purchases?

If Starbucks can’t answer all these questions today (and I’m not sure it can), I would be willing to bet it will be able to answer most of them within five years. I used Starbucks as an example simply because of its recent Facebook milestone. But, really, these points apply to any retailer.

While a lot of people are talking about tokenization solutions as a way to protect cardholder data, no one seems to be talking about what a huge breakthrough tracking information about customers for marketing purposes would be. By implementing tokenization (or at least certain flavors of tokenization), marketers can now track purchase behaviors in a way that has been taboo until now. It is an absolute gold mine, if you can manage the data.