In the highly competitive retail industry, organizations are always looking for ways to improve their position in the market. In the big data era, many key competitive advantages are coming from gathering and analyzing information, but several retailers are having a hard time optimizing their data management strategies.
Retailers across the globe seem to be struggling with information. In Australia, this issue was the theme of a recent conference held to share ideas about data management. At the Australian Information Industry Association event, held earlier this month, consumer strategist Diane Shelton offered a sentiment shared by business executives all over the world.
Shelton, who has worked in the grocery and broadband industries in Australia, told the audience that as information grows, it's becoming harder to make sense of it all.
"We have an enormous difficulty in the short amount of time we've got to look at data and really take out the key points," she said. "Our data colleagues who are working with it all day are just swamped with information, so there's a lot of noise, and online gives you more noise than you ever wanted."
She added that many organizations are procuring massive, complex systems designed to manage data, but they are essentially too big for their own good and are more cumbersome than helpful. For retailers across the planet and here in the United States, the key is to find solutions to simplify the display of information, which can be accomplished with FileMaker development. By creating a custom database software system, organizations can effectively track data and manage it in a way that allows them to obtain key insights and improve their operations.