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Tesco and Big Data

Tesco's missteps with its foray into United states of America and its accounting misadventures are unfortunate. Equally unofrtunate is the fact that the new CEO seems to focus on these negaitive events and fails to provide inspiration to the employees on the ground.

Any large multi national corporattion would have to go through these challenges. However, it must be prepared to meet these challenges. It is very important for the leadership to handle this crisis without any impact to the operations of the organization.

Employees need focus at a time of crisis so that they can keep the engine running. They do not need to know what went wrong in a part of the organization that they were not involved with. The leadership needs to provide the confidence that they can go past the crisis.

The leadership also needs to bring the focus to the opportunities that lie ahead and abstract all the negativity around the crisis.

In all this crisis, one interesting question that comes out is the use of big data for retail operations. I can make a case for both for and against. 

Whats right with big data

Big data is a very good use of otherwise transactional information to mine and fish for opportunities and improve.

For any big retailer, it provides
  • Opportunities to do better at retail operations
  • Listening faster to customers
  • Having better conversations with the suppliers / vendors
It helps big retailers leverage their size and be better for all the stakeholders involved - Employees, vendors, suppliers & customers.

Whats wrong with big data

While big data is great, we have to be careful with the way we handle big data.


  • It should not take focus away from any ground level retail operations and from the entire concept of running a retail operations.
  • Data is not the be all and end all of a retail operations. There are some touch points that are not captured. Do not try to set quantitiatve bench marks and bent upon achieving it. It is good to set them as guide lines so that we know when we do not do the right thing any more
  • When we decide on collecting data, be mindful on the fact that it can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Understand why you want to collect a data and do not read too much into data.
Finally , as with all big data analysis , correlation is not causation.
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Comments

  1. APJPNovember 5, 2014 at 11:37 AM

    A great post on the RIGHT and WRONG of Big Data, it is a well know fact that Tesco beautifully camouflaged their data mining as a part of the most successfully Clubcard loyalty program. Working for Tesco I may say that the leadership is bringing in a lot of focus on the future, but we all have to wait and see how the Grocery Giant is making a comeback

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