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• Post Crosstalk 2012

  - by David Dorf

  This year the Oracle Retail users conference, Crosstalk, had a 20% increase in attendees, which was driven by both new customers and those acquired via Endeca.  As the product assets of Oracle have grown, so has the completeness of the solution set.  This year was marked by the breadth of omni-channel stories. Rose Spicer and her marketing team (see photo on left) always strive for an equal balance of retailer presentations, networking opportunities, and unique experiences -- this year was no exception.  We had 41 different retailers from China, Russia, South Africa, Brazil, Chile, US, Canada and the UK sharing their insights with one another. In all there were 251 executives from 120 iconic brands such as Daphne, Kohl's, Morrisons, Abercrombie & Fitch, Hot Topic, Talbots, Petco, Deckers, Sportmaster, Mr. Price, Falabella, and Disney to name a few. From a product perspective, there were a few new developments from Oracle Retail: Endeca's search engine has been integrated into the ATG commerce platform. The latest Retail Analytics application, Oracle Retail Customer Analytics, is generally available. Oracle Retail previewed a new fully-integrated mobile POS. But the real benefit of attending Crosstalk was hearing about the experiences of retailers and partners.  Here are are a few interesting facts I picked up: At Kohl's, the most popular website accessed by customers within their stores is Facebook.  With all the buzz about showrooming, I was really expecting it to be Amazon. Daphne, a Chinese shoe retailer, is opening 3 new stores per day.  Being located near the factories allows them to have a very agile supply chain as well. Disney Stores have increased sales by 25% at stores upgraded to include Mobile POS.  They continue to lead the pack with excellent customer experiences. Quicksilver reported that 1 in 5 visits to their website comes from a tablet.  More evidence that tablets are replacing traditional PCs in households. By tagging shoes with RFID, Saks is able to ensure all shoe models are on display.  If a model is not being displayed, it has no chance of being sold. Additionally, there were awards, store tours on Michigan Avenue, fireworks at Navy Pier, and the Oracle Retail house band, Bolo313, performing at Solider Field.  Speaking of which, a few retailers got on stage and jammed with band -- possible rival to Rock & Roll Retail? You can always find the latest info from us at the Retail Rack. The next events on tap are the Partner Summit followed by OpenWorld.

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• Crosstalk 2012

  - by David Dorf

  There are lots of industry conferences, but I consistently hear that Oracle Retail Crosstalk is one of the better ones, presumably because its focused is on helping Oracle Retail's customers interact, share insights, and exchange ideas.  If you're an Oracle Retail customer, I strongly encourage you to register and attend.  Here's why: Two days of fantastic speakers from companies like Daphne, Kohl's, Morrisons, Abercrombie & Fitch, Hot Topic, Talbots, and Disney to name a few. Held in the heart of Chicago with store tours on Michigan Avenue Special Interest discussions on merchandising, supply chain, planning, stores, and technology. Golf, fireworks at Navy Pier, and dancing at Soldier Field And best of all, the conference is free for qualified customers. So I certainly hope to see you there!

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• Crosstalk Retail Panel

  - by David Dorf

  Susan Reda from Stores magazine hosted a panel at Crosstalk earlier this year.  I found the discussions on mobile and Commerce Anywhere very interesting, especially from the perspective of retailers not based in the US.  On the panel were: Michel Joncas, CIO at Groupe Dynamite (Canada) David Hunn, Head of IT Delivery at John Lewis (UK) Dan West, CIO at New Look (UK) Tom Madigan, VP at Oracle Retail Take a look: <span id="XinhaEditingPostion"></span>

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• New Rules of Retail

  - by David Dorf

  I've been on vacation and preparing for Crosstalk, so its been a while since I've posted. I've seen the agenda, and I can assure you Crosstalk will be lots of fun. In addition to hearing from lots of retailers, we'll also be doing a little bowling and racing on the track. I'll be around for the sessions, the ORUG meetings, and our Customer Advisory Board so please be sure to say hello. I also just completed a white paper based on a previous blog posting which in turn was based on learnings from reading What Would Google Do? For each of Jarvis' ten rules, I discuss the concept in the context of retail and provide real-world examples. No mention of products or sales pitches at all. You can download the paper here. It will put you in the right frame of mind for hearing Jeff Jarvis speak at Crosstalk. For those that can't make it, I'll post some highlights afterwards.

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• What Would Google Do?

  - by David Dorf

  Last year I read Jeff Jarvis' book What Would Google Do? and found it very interesting. Jeff is a long-time journalist that's been studying technology, and more specifically the internet. He used his skills to reverse-engineer Google into a list of "Google rules," then goes on to describe a futuristic world driven by these rules. Its an interesting look at crowd-sourcing, openness, and collaboration across many industries, including retail (Google Shops). This year Jeff Jarvis will be a keynote speaker at CrossTalk, Oracle's user conference dedicated to the retail industry. This year's theme is... Retail Redefined: Redesign. Reinvigorate. Reimagine. I think that's pretty appropriate given the massive changes the industry has undergone during the last three years. The thing I really like about this conference is that we try to let the retailers do most of the talking. I'm very interested in hearing about the innovative projects they've got brewing, and where they think our industry is heading. I'll be speaking, but I'm not sure about what so let me know of any interesting topics.

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• Library to fake intermittent failures according to tester-defined policy?

  - by crosstalk

  I'm looking for a library that I can use to help mock a program component that works only intermittently - usually, it works fine, but sometimes it fails. For example, suppose I need to read data from a file, and my program has to avoid crashing or hanging when a read fails due to a disk head crash. I'd like to model that by having a mock data reader function that returns mock data 90% of the time, but hangs or returns garbage otherwise. Or, if I'm stress-testing my full program, I could turn on debugging code in my real data reader module to make it return real data 90% of the time and hang otherwise. Now, obviously, in this particular example I could just code up my mock manually to test against a random() routine. However, I was looking for a system that allows implementing any failure policy I want, including: Fail randomly 10% of the time Succeed 10 times, fail 4 times, repeat Fail semi-randomly, such that one failure tends to be followed by a burst of more failures Any policy the tester wants to define Furthermore, I'd like to be able to change the failure policy at runtime, using either code internal to the program under test, or external knobs or switches (though the latter can be implemented with the former). In pig-Java, I'd envision a FailureFaker interface like so: interface FailureFaker { /** Return true if and only if the mocked operation succeeded. Implementors should override this method with versions consistent with their failure policy. */ public boolean attempt(); } And each failure policy would be a class implementing FailureFaker; for example there would be a PatternFailureFaker that would succeed N times, then fail M times, then repeat, and a AlwaysFailFailureFaker that I'd use temporarily when I need to simulate, say, someone removing the external hard drive my data was on. The policy could then be used (and changed) in my mock object code like so: class MyMockComponent { FailureFaker faker; public void doSomething() { if (faker.attempt()) { // ... } else { throw new RuntimeException(); } } void setFailurePolicy (FailureFaker policy) { this.faker = policy; } } Now, this seems like something that would be part of a mocking library, so I wouldn't be surprised if it's been done before. (In fact, I got the idea from Steve Maguire's Writing Solid Code, where he discusses this exact idea on pages 228-231, saying that such facilities were common in Microsoft code of that early-90's era.) However, I'm only familiar with EasyMock and jMockit for Java, and neither AFAIK have this function, or something similar with different syntax. Hence, the question: Do such libraries as I've described above exist? If they do, where have you found them useful? If you haven't found them useful, why not?

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• Social Network Stalking

  - by David Dorf

  Think about this: By reading this blog, you and I are connected. We have this blog and its topics in common, so there's a chance we have other things in common as well. In any relationship there is a degree of trust and influence. If you trust me, at least in terms of particular subjects, then I have some influence over you. If I buy an iPad, then there's an opportunity for me to influence your possible purchase of an over-hyped tablet that you don't really need. So what could a retailer do with this? Retailers that have fans and followers should assume that the friends of those fans and followers are more susceptible to their marketing efforts. If I'm a fan of Apple, then Apple will be more successful marketing to my friends than marketing to random people. Intuitively that makes sense, at least to me. Companies like 33Across and Pursway are already putting this theory into practice, and achieving some interesting results. Jeff Jarvis, who by-the-way is speaking at CrossTalk this year, has been discussing the power of influencers in social networks. In his blog he rails against marketers and says "messages and influence aren't the future of marketing; conversations and relationships are." Valuable messages will be passed on because they are valuable, not because someone has the power to exert influence. True enough, but that won't stop the efforts underway to leverage social networks for more targeted advertising. From a business perspective, this sounds like a goldmine to me; on a personal level, it's a bit creepy.

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• Your Experience Platform

  - by David Dorf

  Crosstalk once again exceeded my expectations, improving upon last year's conference in terms of venue, knowledge sharing, and entertainment.  Its great to see the Oracle Retail family continues to grow, especially outside the US.  I had a great time talking to retailers, analysts, press, and colleagues from around the world. Because the economy, demographics, technology, etc. are constantly changing, retailers must always be evolving their business to capture the next market.  But it takes guts to change something that appears to be working, and it takes a bit of luck to get the timing right.  To a large extent, innovation is about "guts and luck." To help retailers innovate, Oracle Retail provides all the necessary software to create Your Experience Platform.  There is no "Oracle Experience Platform" as each retailer needs something different to deliver on their brand promise.  We provide the actionable insight, optimized operations, and connected interactions, but its still up to the retailer to make it theirs. One such retailer is Masters, a home improvement retailer in Australia formed through a partnership between Woolworths and Lowes.  Woolworths is an established retailer in Australia, so they are already close to their customers and able to understand their needs.  In Australia 74% of dwellings are detached houses and the population is continues to "move up" into bigger and bigger homes. Masters is using Oracle Retail's software to create their experience platform that will deliver on their brand promise, which includes everyday low prices, wide range of products, smarter self-service, and an inviting store environment.  The Oracle Retail software provides the foundation that allows them to rapidly deliver on this promise -- Masters is engineered for success.

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• Will it be possible to use any asp.net and silverlight controls in Intraweb XII?

  - by user193655

  I am researching a lot on intraweb, I read that in Intraweb XII (when will this be released?) it will be possible to have: 1) "silverlight enabled controls" (mentioned here, this is the old IW XI roadmap anyway silverlight task has been moved to XII now) 2) "IntraWeb XII [...] will contain the integration with CrossTalk and ASP.NET" (mentioned here, check for Intraweb XII paragraph). Now I don't understand what this mean in detail. I think IW is very cool, but it lacks a good choice of components, there is only one vendor (TMS) that makes good components, but of course one can wonder "why to be limited to one vendor when I can use more components from more vendors"? So does anyone (ideally from IW team, or that really knows the inner workings of IW XII, I mean the details of the roadmap, since XII is not being developed yet) know what the bold sentences above mean? Will this mean I can use inside IW 3rd party components from any ASP.NET and Silverlight vendor like Telerik, DevExpress, ComponentOne, and many, many, more?

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• Maximizing the Value of Software

  - by David Dorf

  A few years ago we decided to increase our investments in documenting retail processes and architectures.  There were several goals but the main two were to help retailers maximize the value they derive from our software and help system integrators implement our software faster.  The sale is only part of our success metric -- its actually more important that the customer realize the benefits of the software.  That's when we actually celebrate. This week many of our customers are gathered in Chicago to discuss their successes during our annual Crosstalk conference.  That provides the perfect forum to announce the release of the Oracle Retail Reference Library.  The RRL is available for free to Oracle Retail customers and partners.  It contains 1000s of hours of work and represents years of experience in the retail industry.  The Retail Reference Library is composed of three offerings: Retail Reference Model We've been sharing the RRM for several years now, with lots of accolades.  The RRM is a set of business process diagrams at varying levels of granularity. This release marks the debut of Visio documents, which should make it easier for retailers to adopt and edit the diagrams.  The processes represent an approximation of the Oracle Retail software, but at higher levels they are pretty generic and therefore usable with other software as well.  Using these processes, the business and IT are better able to communicate the expectations of the software.  They can be used to guide customization when necessary, and help identify areas for optimization in the organization. Retail Reference Architecture When embarking on a software implementation project, it can be daunting to start from a blank sheet of paper.  So we offer the RRA, a comprehensive set of documents that describe the retail enterprise in terms of logical architecture, physical deployments, and systems integration.  These documents and diagrams describe how all the systems typically found in a retailer enterprise work together.  They serve as a way to jump-start implementations using best practices we've captured over the years. Retail Semantic Glossary Have you ever seen two people argue over something because they're using misaligned terminology?  Its a huge waste and happens all the time.  The Retail Semantic Glossary is a simple application that allows retailers to define terms and metrics in a centralized database.  This initial version comes with limited content with the goal of adding more over subsequent releases.  This is the single source for defining key performance indicators, metrics, algorithms, and terms so that the retail organization speaks in a consistent language. These three offerings are downloaded from MyOracleSupport separately and linked together using the start page above.  Everything is navigated using a Web browser.  See the Oracle Retail Documentation blog for more details.

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• Android: changing drawable states of option menu items seems to have side-effects

  - by pjv

  In my onCreateOptionsMenu() I have basically the following: public boolean onCreateOptionsMenu(Menu menu) { menu.add(Menu.NONE, MENU_ITEM_INSERT, Menu.NONE, R.string.item_menu_insert).setShortcut('3', 'a').setIcon(android.R.drawable.ic_menu_add); PackageManager pm = getPackageManager(); if(pm.hasSystemFeature(PackageManager.FEATURE_CAMERA) && pm.hasSystemFeature(PackageManager.FEATURE_CAMERA_AUTOFOCUS)){ menu.add(Menu.NONE, MENU_ITEM_SCAN_ADD, Menu.NONE, ((Collectionista.DEBUG)?"DEBUG Scan and add item":getString(R.string.item_menu_scan_add))).setShortcut('4', 'a').setIcon(android.R.drawable.ic_menu_add); } ... } And in onPrepareOptionsMenu among others the following: final boolean scanAvailable = ScanIntent.isInstalled(this); final MusicCDItemScanAddTask task = new MusicCDItemScanAddTask(this); menu.findItem(MENU_ITEM_SCAN_ADD).setEnabled(scanAvailable && (tasks == null || !existsTask(task))); As you see, two options items have the same drawable set (android.R.drawable.ic_menu_add). Now, if in onPrepareOptionsMenu the second menu item gets disabled, its label and icon become gray, but also the icon of the first menu item becomes gray, while the label of that fist menu item stays black and it remains clickable. What is causing this crosstalk between the two icons/drawables? Shouldn't the system handle things like mutate() in this case? I've included a screenshot:

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• Google Rules for Retail

  - by David Dorf

  In the book What Would Google Do?, Jeff Jarvis outlines ten "Google Rules" that define how Google acts.  These rules help define how Web 2.0 businesses operate today and into the future.  While there's a chapter in the book on applying these rules to the retail industry, it wasn't very in-depth.  So I've decided to more directly apply the rules to retail, along with some notable examples of success.  The table below shows Jeff's Google Rule, some Industry Examples, and New Retailer Rules that I created. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} table.MsoTableGrid {mso-style-name:"Table Grid"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-priority:59; mso-style-unhide:no; border:solid black 1.0pt; mso-border-themecolor:text1; mso-border-alt:solid black .5pt; mso-border-themecolor:text1; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-border-insideh:.5pt solid black; mso-border-insideh-themecolor:text1; mso-border-insidev:.5pt solid black; mso-border-insidev-themecolor:text1; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} Google Rule Industry Examples New Retailer Rule New Relationship Your worst customer is your friend; you best customer is your partner Newegg.com lets manufacturers respond to customer comments that are critical of the product, and their EggXpert site lets customers help other customers. Listen to what your customers are saying about you.  Convert the critics to fans and the fans to influencers. New Architecture Join a network; be a platform Tesco and BestBuy released APIs for their product catalogs so third-parties could create new applications. Become a destination for information. New Publicness Life is public, so is business Zappos and WholeFoods founders are prolific tweeters/bloggers, sharing their opinions and connecting to customers.  It's not always pretty, but it's genuine. Be transparent.  Share both your successes and failures with your customers. New Society Elegant organization Wet Seal helps their customers assemble outfits and show them off to each other.  Barnes & Noble has a community site that includes a bookclub. Communities of your customers already exist, so help them organize better. New Economy Mass market is dead; long live the mass of niches lululemon found a niche for yoga inspired athletic wear.  Threadless uses crowd-sourcing to design short-runs of T-shirts. Serve small markets with niche products. New Business Reality Decide what business you're in When Lowes realized catering to women brought the men along, their sales increased. Customers want experiences to go with the products they buy. New Attitude Trust the people and listen In 2008 Starbucks launched MyStartbucksIdea to solicit ideas from their customers. Use social networks as additional data points for making better merchandising decisions. New Ethic Be honest and transparent; don't be evil Target is giving away reusable shopping bags for Earth Day.  Kohl's has outfitted 67 stores with solar arrays. Being green earns customers' respect and lowers costs too. New Speed Life is live H&M and Zara keep up with fashion trends. Be prepared to pounce on you customers' fickle interests. New Imperatives Encourage, enable and protect innovation 1-800-Flowers was the first do sales in Facebook and an early adopter of mobile commerce.  The Sears Personal Shopper mobile app finds products based on a photo. Give your staff permission to fail so innovation won't be stifled. Jeff will be a keynote speaker at Crosstalk, our upcoming annual user conference, so I'm looking forward to hearing more of his perspective on retail and the new economy.

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