Forrester Research’s Brian Walker: What Does It Mean to Be Omnichannel?

People may try to just reach out across the silos, across the different lines– marketing and IT, or online to store. If you’re not looking at a project as a long-term program, it’s going to be really easy to just look at it like oh, we collaborated. We collected some requirements or some ideas.

Mobile is a really good example where you may not want to look at this any longer as a project. You really need to look at this as a long-term program, or an investment, or a new business, essentially, to invest in. And you may want to pull top resources from around the organization together to work as a team. Not to launch a project, but really to optimize that over time.

And they can take the learnings and the findings and also the requirements and needs of the organizations they are from to bear when they work on mobile. And I’m talking about not just IT and marketing, we need to look at the store channel. We need to look at the supply chain. We need to look at customer service, certainly, and say what’s important there around something like mobile, for example.

So I think really it’s companies not looking at it in terms of a project any longer, but looking at these things as long-term things to optimize over time. They’re not going to get it right the first time, nor should they expect to. And therefore, a fire and forget mentality of we launched that– well, how are you going to optimize that over time? And how are you going to make it right for the customer and differentiating for the business to drive a more profitable relationship with a customer?