Today's retailers must enable and enhance customer lifestyles. Customers expect flexible and consistent shopping between and across retailer's channels.

To support unified retail commerce, retail CIOs must help unify execution of customer-facing processes to improve customer experience.

What is Unified Retail Commerce?

Regardless of the number of retail channels, customer expectations of consistent and flexible shopping between and across channels mean that all of the retailer's customer-facing processes must be unified, providing an exceptional customer experience.

These customer processes should be defined in their most basic terms: consume, search, transact and fulfill, all passing through the lens of customer experience.

Retailers of all types must engage in digital business transformation built on a foundation of customer understanding to facilitate a unified retail commerce experience.

In this new business environment, the role of the CIO as a trusted advisor to the business, in particular to the CEO, is more relevant than ever.

We can help retail CIOs and their teams learn about key customer processes and how the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, mobile, social, cloud and big data are converging to form a modern technology foundation for digital business required for unity in delivering seamless customer experiences.

Guided by Gartner research, CIOs will be able to credibly advise the business on how to prioritise investments based on such a technology foundation to achieve the core competences of collaboration for innovation, excellence in data management and strong operational execution.

This will enable the transformation of the business from a multichannel one to one that is a unified, customer-led digital retail business.