Shelly’s Healthy Grocery store (SHGS) is facing an existential crisis in its business due to an outdated and inadequate IT infrastructure limiting its ability to compete in the modern retail landscape. The company’s outdated IT infrastructure makes it difficult to support its business goals of increasing sales, reducing costs, building brand awareness, enhancing customer experience, and expanding into new markets. Therefore, to develop an effective strategy, it is crucial to conduct a SWOT analysis examining the company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats as they relate to technology and information systems. This analysis will inform recommendations regarding upgrading legacy systems, acquiring new technologies, and leveraging IT to gain competitive advantages. A modern, robust IT infrastructure will provide SHGS with the agility and capabilities to achieve its objectives and make critical business decisions in a rapidly evolving retail environment.

Connected World

The emergence of a highly connected world has dramatically changed the retail landscape, providing opportunities and challenges for traditional brick-and-mortar grocery chains like Shelly’s. SHGS’s outdated IT infrastructure is a significant weakness in capitalizing on the connected world, but new technologies could turn this into a strength.

A key opportunity is tapping into mobile commerce, which has exploded recently. Global mobile commerce revenues topped in 2021, and eMarketer predicts it will grow over 10.4% by 2025 In the United States (Wurmser, 2021). With consumers increasingly using smartphones for shopping and payments, SHGS needs a mobile commerce strategy. The company should develop mobile apps, enable in-app promotions and coupons, provide mobile checkout, integrate with digital wallets like Apple Pay and Google Pay, and optimize its website for mobile (Ghandvar et al., 2024). Investing in technologies like Bluetooth beacons would allow SHGS to send personalized offers to shoppers’ devices when they enter a store. Activity tracking and geofencing features could target ads and messages when shoppers are near a location. Unifying data across channels is also essential for omnichannel retail. SHGS lacks the integrated IT infrastructure to achieve true omnichannel capabilities that blur lines between physical and digital (Ghandvar et al., 2024). New technologies like digital experience and customer data platforms could provide a single view of customers and inventory across channels. This would allow endless aisles in stores, ship-from-store fulfillment, and buy-online pickup in-store.

Another opportunity is leveraging technologies like Internet of Things sensors, RFID tags, and video analytics to gain greater visibility into inventory and operations. SHGS’s outdated infrastructure has prevented it from tapping into these innovations to reduce out-of-stock, improve supply chain efficiency, optimize product availability, stop loss, and analyze in-store data like foot traffic patterns (Rath et al., 2024). Implementing retail IoT solutions can drive significant cost reductions and sales increases. Connecting physical assets to the digital world unlocks game-changing data.

However, SHGS must also ensure its infrastructure is secure. The proliferation of connected devices has massively increased attack surfaces. SHGS legacy systems lack robust security for today’s cyber threats. The company must invest in modern cybersecurity tools, network segmentation, data encryption, and employee training to guard against breaches that could erode customer trust. Data privacy regulations like GDPR must also be addressed. While the connected world presents challenges for traditional retailers, revamping SHGS’s IT infrastructure and adopting new technologies can allow the company to capitalize on omnichannel retail, mobile commerce, IoT, and modern cybersecurity to achieve its goals.

E-Commerce

E-commerce presents significant opportunities for SHGS to increase sales by reaching new online markets, but its outdated IT systems severely limit its e-commerce capabilities. Developing robust, scalable e-commerce platforms and infrastructure should be a top priority. According to Tudor (2022), by the end of 2025, e-commerce retail sales will make up 16.72 percent of all US retail sales (Tudor, 2022). However, SHGS has lagged far behind this growth due to its 1990s-era proprietary software that lacks modern e-commerce functionality. The company’s website is outdated and does not provide the personalized omnichannel experience that consumers expect. The lack of integration across inventory, order management, fulfillment, and customer data prevents SHGS from implementing critical capabilities like ship-from-store, online pickup in-store (BOPIS), and flexible deliv