By David Foote [Author’s Note: This is the first in a two-part series highlighting the fastest growing and highest paying certified and noncertified tech skills at 3,038 U.S. and Canadian employers.] If you’re new to this space you may be unaware that more employers than ever are paying their tech workers extra cash over and…
Category: IDG Contributor Network
IDG Contributor Network
IDG Contributor Network: Self-checkout: What shoppers want to do is rarely what they end up doing
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By Evan Schuman One of the first things retail executives learn is that shopper surveys are horrible indicators of what shoppers will do in stores. Asked if they would make purchases at a breached retailer, they’ll routinely say no. But quarterly earnings betray the truth that being breached has just about zero influence on revenue.…
IDG Contributor Network: Amazon successfully fights off pricebots
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By Evan Schuman One big downside of the plethora of e-commerce shopping bots out there today is that they create the impression of a difference when there may not be one. If I may give my two cents’ worth, is a two-cent difference meaningful, especially when shipping prices are far more than that? Significant difference…
IDG Contributor Network: Walmart.com’s transformation: Too little, much too late
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By Evan Schuman This month, BusinessWeek took a look at how Jet.com is doing in its effort to transform Walmart.com. My conclusion: The biggest obstacle to Walmart.com being successful is Walmart itself. This is hardly news to readers of this blog, as we have been skeptical about Jet’s odds against the Bentonville behemoth and have…
IDG Contributor Network: Device-as-a-service makes device ownership and management a thing of the past
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By Christoph Schell There’s a seismic shift happening in the tech industry today, with subscription-based services on a major upward trajectory. With everything-as-a-service (XaaS), companies can tailor their computing environment to shape the experiences they want and support the technology needs of an ever-evolving workforce. The device-as-a-service (DaaS) model in particular is finding a receptive…
IDG Contributor Network: 4 key techniques for continuous improvement in corporate innovation
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By Nicholas D. Evans If you’re leading a corporate innovation program for your organization, or you’re part of the core innovation team, one of the key considerations after it’s been up and running for a while is how to continuously improve and refine the program over time. While there’s a lot of attention paid to…
IDG Contributor Network: Apparel chains can fight back against Amazon, but it won’t be easy
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By Evan Schuman With recent reports that Amazon is preparing to make a major play in custom clothing — as well as apparel in general — clothing chains are panicking. To be fair, when many physical chain executives hear the word “Amazon,” panic seems to be the default response. The good news is that panic…
IDG Contributor Network: 4 considerations for navigating ‘innovation antibodies’ and ‘innovation theater’
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By Nicholas D. Evans In recent years, we’ve started to see terms such as “innovation antibodies” and “innovation theater” being used to describe some of the challenges in managing innovation, particularly in larger organizations trying to find their own innovation culture. Today, many innovation leaders must carefully navigate the waters between too much resistance to…
IDG Contributor Network: 7-Eleven thinks it can go cashier-less. It’s wrong.
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By Evan Schuman There’s a massive difference between retailers using technology to free up associates to do more hands-on work and using that technology to replace those associates. Freeing up will work but replacement won’t. 7-Eleven’s plans to rid itself of the need for store associates, by leveraging RFID-tagged merchandise and relying on payment cards…
IDG Contributor Network: The real meaning of a merged channel strategy
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By Evan Schuman There has been a wide range of thoughts about the meaning of physical store closings, coming from some major retail thinkers and various major media news outlets. But the underlying assumptions in almost all of these arguments are flawed. They cast physical stores and online sites as distinct entities, even rivals. The…