Decision-support technology is moving, both up to the executive suite and down to the store level, putting greater stress on information systems departments.
ecutives grow more computer-savvy, many still need a technology "mentor" to take full advantage of decision-support technology.
Store managers, hungry for information, are also making greater use of decision-support systems. While IS executives applaud the spread of technology to the store level, their departments have had to adapt to providing support on a 24-hour basis to fit in with supermarket retailing's round-the-clock needs.
SN: Are supermarkets getting the most they can out of decision-support technology?
NICHOLSON: Our experience is that the decision-support tools are constantly changing. The problem is that you can't be constantly changing; you have to latch onto a tool or two and go with it.
SMITH: There is rapid evolution: After you select the tool to help you make decisions, the parameters of the questions frequently change because of the information learned. You go down a certain path, you learn something, and it alters your course of inquiry because of what you learned, so it in turn changes the nature of the query.
HOMA: We have found that the tools have not lived up to the hype. Some are good for hypothesis-based queries; some are better for discovery-based analysis. The tools end of it is very underdeveloped.
SN: What specifically is the problem with current technology?
SMITH: It's not intuitive enough. To a management person who is not highly computer literate, none of the stuff we do is intuitive enough. That kind of person needs a technology mentor to help them, or the tool will sit idle or underutilized.
Related to that is the issue of user-friendliness, which I would say is the biggest challenge in decision-support today. Actually, these tools will never be user-friendly enough until we can use speech commands instead of keystrokes.
DRURY: Decision-support technology is moving out of the headquarters building to the stores. The more the store manager knows about his customer and what's going on in his store, the better job he can do.
DRURY: The problem is that while the headquarters building is pretty much a 9-to-5 operation, stores aren't. The IS department will get questions 24 hours a day. In addition, geography becomes an issue when an IS person can't just walk across a hall to see somebody. We have to be prepared to handle problems we can't see.
