We spoke to some key players in the retail industry, and here’s what they had to say…
At Netpremacy, we aim to create a community whereby people and businesses feel welcome to come and openly discuss industry challenges they may have, and come to us with questions they may have on Google Cloud. Recently, we created that environment and invited a specific few technology leaders in the Retail industry to “sit” at our virtual roundtable. We then had honest and open conversations about the challenges 2020 has brought and how they are looking to overcome them.
This was a successful discussion, our attendees were all given bespoke coffee hampers to start the morning off the right way – with a fresh pot of brewed coffee in hand. A must before any meeting can start!
We were joined by Becky Postlethwaite, Google Cloud Industry Manager in Retail at Google. A retail specialist with knowledge in the market and deep trusted relationships with Retailers in the Google Cloud space. Running the session was Ben Trood, Head of Business Development and Netpremacy retail specialist. Finally, the session was chaired by our Head of Customer Success and transformation guru, Martin Russell.
There were a number of topics discussed in this session, although it was noted at the end “and we haven’t finished yet, we could talk for hours”. However, some key challenges were highlighted and it was interesting to see how much businesses have had to adapt and react to change since the start of 2020.
Change
This year has been a driver for change. Companies have been forced to move away from the office culture.
Is it now time to look at changing because of this?
It could cause minimal disruption to the businesses currently due to the current COVID situation. This could potentially be a great time to ignite the fire of changing the way you work within your business.
The meeting made it clear that the factor holding some businesses back from making change is how their workforce will react to it. This is a BIG factor when looking at moving to the cloud, and it’s imperative that correct training and change management strategies are put into place.
However, it was also highlighted that people are a lot more reactive to change than we think, some of the attendees mentioned that the current situation had made them “rip off the plaster” and had no choice but to create a remote workforce. It showed that Covid has proved that people are more open to change than we may think.
Blockers are something we don’t want to think about but are very real for many businesses. We spoke about the main things businesses were finding were blocking their path to move to the cloud.
Challenges when looking at moving to the cloud
• Fear of change from the top
• Focus on what it’s going to bring and how it’s going to change things
• The amount of time and effort it takes to upgrade
• The brief of change is expected thanks to covid, people understand that change does need to happen
• More stress on the technology team
Culture and transforming the way you work
We talk about transforming the way you work a lot. But what does that actually mean?
Well, at Netpremacy we perhaps take that for granted. However, there are still businesses all over the Globe that simply cannot begin to fathom working remotely as they are still stuck with an on-premise mindset and old school technology stacks to match. It can be hard to imagine working from any device, anywhere, anytime when you are so used to being hardwired into an ethernet cable that’s underneath your specific desk.
We spoke about how moving your infrastructure to the cloud has a dramatic effect on the way your business works.
We heard from 2 of our customers on why they decided to make the move, their main takeaways were:
Why Google Cloud?
• The need to modernise their desktop
• Wanting the ability to collaborate and share information easier
• Attracting talent – people were coming through the door and expected the best infrastructure and technology at their fingertips
• Unlimited storage
• Wanting to make decisions, fast and communicate better
• Wanting to bring everyone from different office locations together to become more unified
• Security and single sign-on
• More straight forward to use, and were so lucky they were on Google cloud when covid hit
• Google Meet interaction integration with the rest of the suite is second to none
The overall session was a great opportunity to have a frank and informative discussion on what challenges different companies are facing, and how we can work together to overcome these obstacles. It was interesting to hear stories from the field on how different people cope with change differently, and eye-opening to realise that with the right tools how easy it can be to become a remote workforce that is prepared for unprecedented challenges such as the whole country being sent home, to work.
Due to the success of this session, we will be running more intimate sessions such as these that are limited in numbers and exclusive to industry-specific topics.
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