Evan Schuman

Are consumers seeing self-checkout as the anti-customer-service initiative they feared? Not according to the latest industry study, which predicts self-checkout revenue will double this year (compared with 2004) to $161 billion, and could hit $454 billion by 2008. The study, conducted by retail consulting firm IHL Consulting Group, is far more interesting than those numbers […]

With almost 3,000 stores in all 50 states, the Rent-A-Center retail chain needs to be able to expand quickly and easily.But its business model allows customers to rent and return merchandise with little notice, forcing store layouts to be flexible. What if 30 customers return mattresses to the same store tomorrow?Tony Fuller, the CIO for […]

A major regional fast-food chain—with 433 restaurants in the Southeastern United States—is going to offer free wireless connections to anyone who wants to surf while sitting in a burger joint. The Krystal Co. (the nation’s second-oldest fast-food restaurant chain, founded in 1932) is clearly hoping that a lot of customers will be intrigued and will […]

At a time when IT executives are finding users less and less tolerant of network delays, CIO William Morgan has perhaps the least tolerant set of users in the world. Morgan runs technology operations for the 215-year-old Philadelphia Stock Exchange, the nation’s first stock exchange. But its age doesn’t make its daily load any easier, […]

Typically, a CIO arguing for a $30 to $40 million IT investment for new payment systems has to answer a lot of questions from a skeptical CEO, chief financial officer and board members. But that wasn’t the recent experience of Canadian Tire Corp. CIO Andrew Wnek. Wnek reports to the CEO and runs IT for […]

Security audits—often conducted by the same firms that handle financial audits—are supposed to be an outsider’s expert view of how safe and secure a company’s systems are. But in reality, many security audits today are executed under such tight restrictions that they reveal little that the CIO didn’t already know. In the recent massive Visa […]

The Overstock.com Web site is all about pricing, as it pitches itself as saving consumers as much as 80 percent compared with other retailers. But in its rapidly growing IT department, the obsession is speed. How fast? During a recent major deployment of some large Teradata packages—including CRM, profit analytics and an enterprise data warehouse—Teradata […]

In the Information Age that we’re in, quality of information trumps quantity every time. And for CIOs, that’s good news. But there’s a big piece of bad news, too. The flood of information at the command of customers is both good and bad, and many customers—especially consumers—rarely can tell the difference. Consider a consumer who […]

When it comes to privacy issues, the online airline/travel industry is moving in the opposite direction from most industries and is using personal data more aggressively than it did just a few months ago, according to a new report from an industry consulting firm. Excluding privacy, the travel industry is doing quite well in terms […]

Top payment-system executives traveled to Washington on Thursday to try to convince members of Congress that no new laws are needed for credit card payment security, that the industry can police itself just fine. But the facts delivered during the testimony told a very different story. What forced the hearing was a well-publicized security breach […]

During congressional testimony Thursday, executives from bank and credit card companies involved in the largest credit card data loss ever pointed fingers at a new culprit for gaps in security: the auditors who had certified the credit card processing systems as being up to snuff. But in an interview with Ziff Davis Internet News, those […]

In the retail world, selling clothing is mostly about convincing customers what looks good on them. And it certainly helps if the salesperson already knows what’s in that customer’s closet, what her favorite colors are, her price range and her size. That’s why Douglas Deruchie, the CIO of Canada’s largest retail clothing chain, is spending […]