David Bolton Strikes Again

Training a Graduate Software Engineer

2013-06-16T00:00:00+10:00

Previously I've written about universities and industry preparation of students. At the time of writing that post, I was working in a large company with a compact digital department that mainly utilised Ruby and front end skills, and now I'm working in a giant media company with a sizeable digital operation, which has just shown to me how tricky it is to make a great curriculum that caters to industry as a whole. Overall, however, the move has changed the specifics of my views, but not the general philosophy.

If we take decent graduated software engineering students, or students doing industrial placements during their degree, how would we best prepare them for industry? If people have the desire to be good software engineers, what do we need to do to equip them with the skills to be desirable in a team?

Here is what MY post-graduation curriculum would look cover, to create engineers for MY specific needs:

Test driven development
Agile processes focusing on collaboration & teamwork
Advanced version control
Continuous delivery
Refactoring
Caching strategies for the web
Building services & APIs
Front end technology bootcamp (getting started with JS, HTML5 & CSS3 intros)

A crucial note here is that aside from Agile processes, the main things I want covered are backed by computer science fundamentals at some level. This is an important note: the existing curriculum of a computer science degree is not redundant, as one of the opinion pieces mentioned in my previous post suggested.

We could teach these subjects to students after graduation, but could these subjects be taught as part of a university course? To some degree, yes, but it is not as simple as that, as the teaching would happen within the construct of university teaching. A course in an Australian university is usually twelve to thirteen weeks long, with a fulltime student usually doing four subjects per a semester. Face-to-face time for a course is usually an hour or two of lectures a week, and another hour or two of tutorial time. To develop many (not all) of these skills students need to be around their peers with expert guidance -- they're not skills that the majority of students will just pick up by reading a book.

With only a few dozen hours of facetime in total per course it would be a real challenge to cover anything more than the basics if we tried to cover the bulk of this in a single course. If we changed the approach from a single course to a whole semester covering industrial skills, i.e. four concurrent subjects, then we might have better success. Let's see how that might look:

Subject 1: Being an Agile developer
- Test driven development
- Refactoring
- Advanced version control
- Continuous Delivery (covering CI, but also how version control, CI and automated testing fit together to deliver to production)
Subject 2: Working with others
- Agile team skills - collaboration, user stories, roles, planning
- Building a team and delivery culture
Subject 3: Supporting web applications
- Caching strategies for the web
- Building services & APIs
Subject 4: Building in the browser
- JavaScript
- HTML5 & CSS3

There, now that could work. Of course, the problem with this course is that it is built for my needs as a hiring manager in a particular company context. Would it work for everyone? No, and that is the problem with trying to insist that universities need to teach these courses. Could these work as individual electives? Perhaps, but then I wouldn't be hiring an industry ready developer if they hadn't covered the breadth of the curriculum outlined above.

Could a company work this curriculum into on the job training? Absolutely, but to really be effective at it would require teaching skills that most companies don't have the capability or bandwidth to deliver. And relying on external training partners is not likely to be achieveable from a cost perspective, particularly when it is can be difficult to retain talent - investments that walk out the door are an issue.

So what is the answer? I think this could be fixed by a combination of approaches. Universities should consider how they teach practical subjects of being a software practitioner, in particular: version control, automated testing and refactoring, and some exposure to a wider variety of commercially popular languages. Then companies need to have a great approach to building teams, and could probably do so at a reasonably low cost with little impact, since building great teams should be one of their chief objectives anyway. And finally, companies can support both internal and external communities to help drive skills in areas such as web development and browser based technology.

Obviously coordinating this level of knowledge building across institutions like would be difficult, particularly as a single university sends graduates out to dozens or hundreds of different companies, but with some level of cooperation this could be a decent approach.

A final note on this subject is that it must be highlighted that a professional developer needs to take a lot of responsibility for their own progression in these areas. I recognise that some students will not struggle with motivation, but exposure -- they don't know what they don't know, and that can make it hard to learn.

I'm interested in other thoughts in this area. I have spent a small amount of time with universities this year, and it has piqued my interest further, as I think faculties are asking themselves about how to stay relevant in a world where there is so much online education as well. For mine, universities are definitely still relevant, but they do need to adjust as well, just as companies need to come to the party.

Learn To Code

2013-03-02T00:00:00+11:00

I absolutely endorse this! Not because we need more engineers (we do), but just because it is an amazing way to learn to think, to easily accomplish something that can be widely useful to other people, and it is a simple path to a sense of achievement. For those reasons alone, coding is worthwhile.

Dan Levinthal and Competitive Advantage

2013-02-28T00:00:00+11:00

Tonight I was lucky enough to attend a UNSW AGSM innovation night featuring Dan Levinthal from The Wharton School, an extremely highly cited world-class business thinker. Here are some of my raw and barely edited notes on his talk 'The Short Shelf-Life of Competitive Advantage: The role of innovation and adaptation':

Sustained Competitive Advantage vs Renewal

Is sustained competitive advantage realistic?
Between 1957 and 1997, only 74 firms from 1957 S&P 500 survived, and only 12 of them outperformed.
Perhaps we should just accept that competitive advantage is temporary
Rather focus on "renewal": new opportunities, exiting existing positions
"It's not the strongest of the species that survive, but the one that is most responsive to change" - Darwin
"The ability to learn faster than your competitors may be the only sustainable competitive advantage"

Exploration - Exploitation

Evolving entities:
- Need to survive in present and adapt to enhance survival in future
Always opportunities to improve an organisation, it is never perfect
Competitors are also improving

Challenges of exploration and exploitation

Exploration vs exploitation is disruptive vs sustaining

Myopia of learning

Learning is feedback driven - fast feedback
Exploitation/sustaining is immediate, exploration/disruptive is distant (and may fail)

Real options

Early "stage-setting" investments may provide good options later
Staged/structured experiments
This only works if you can easily terminate an option
- But you don't know if something is working or "in the money"
- Failure isn't good for one's career - so there is incentive for people to make it look like it worked

Select & variety

Dan credits Clayton Christensen's thinking here
Selection criteria: existing customers may not want it
So, challenge of finding viable applications

Discussion

Dan throws the floor open to audience questions, with some thought starters on the screen:

How do we go about managing less successful experiments?
How do we acount for career consequences?

(At this point I was handed a microphone and embarrassingly asked an asinine question, Dan was very gracious about it though)

Summary

I was glad that I've recently read Clayton's Christensen's Innovator's Dillema book, as it was so relevant to the presentation. It's certainly an area that is super relevant to my current career path.

An interesting evening. I sat in the front row and typed notes, but in future I'd love to be bold enough to bring my Wacom tablet and sketchnote this sort of event. Will need to practice some more!

Sketchnoting The Effective Executive

2013-01-04T00:00:00+11:00

I was first introduced to "mind maps" through Tony Buzan's books in the early nineties, and since then have used them often to quickly outline ideas. I also used them extensively during my Masters degree. I have a friend who has been doing animated mindmaps to outline books and ideas, and I've really enjoyed those too. So, when I first heard about the idea of "sketchnoting" (I believe through Sacha Chau's blog), it was an easy sell. A month or two ago, I purchased Mike Rohde's Sketchnote Handbook (which I reviewed on Goodreads), and just in the last week I've finally had a chance to put pen to paper to sketchnote a couple of my favourite books of 2012.

The first of those was Peter Drucker's The Effective Executive (my Goodreads review). Here is my "sketchnote" for the book:

I'm mostly pleased with it. It is a bit more dynamic and visual than my mindmaps have been in the past. I tried to draw a few things using simple shapes, as Mike recommends, and they sort of worked. I was also concerned about "managing space" on the page, but this wasn't too bad. With a mind map, since everything is radial, white space and space management wasn't so much of an issue. And it turns out I was able to capture the major thrusts of the book without running out of space, however I could see this being an issue with some sorts of books.

I'll have some more sketchnotes, and perhaps some of my old mindmaps for contrast, to post in the coming days.

Sketchnoting How Will You Measure Your Life

2013-01-04T00:00:00+11:00

After my first sketchnoting attempt, I next sketchnoted another of my favourite books from 2012, Clayton Christensen's How Will You Measure Your Life. I used a slightly different style this time, going for a column based layout rather than radial, and tried some other drawing techniques. Again, mostly happy, but also looking forward to improving. I think I'll be referring to these visualisations often, much easier to use as a refresher than a book or more linear notes.

Education and Software Engineering

2012-12-16T00:00:00+11:00

Recently I read Michael Fox's post on Australia needing more software engineers and Mitchell Harper's SMH opinion piece on the deficiencies of our university system for teaching software engineering. Interesting. I've done a bunch of hiring of engineers in Sydney over a number of years, so I've an opinion in these areas too.

Is it true?

Wanting to know if it was an accepted statistical fact, I quickly scanned the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations skill shortage lists, but this didn't reveal any particular shortage in IT generally. Anecdotally and through my own experience, recruiting engineers can be difficult, but we've also never had a shortage of applicants, even for niche roles. A lot of the difficulty arises in finding top notch talent, not finding people to interview.

So the issue is not volume, but talent, and it is a skills shortage. We have the people, but the people don't have the skills. This makes sense: people in software engineering are well paid, and get to do interesting, challenging work, so there is no doubt that it's an attractive role. Knowing that you want to work in software engineering and having desirable skills are two separate things.

Does university teach how to be a good software engineer?

Reflecting on my own undergraduate education (studying Information Systems at the University of New South Wales), the computer science curriculum was geared towards fundamentals. The first year course was taught in Haskell, which I think many professionals would agree is a great introduction - it makes prospective engineers think in functions and side effects and is an ideal teaching language. The sum of these subjects is a good background in computer science, not an industry ready developer.

Even today (review the curriculum here), the focus is mostly on core computer science and mathematics. There is nothing related to practical industry needs, or web development, or best practices for organising work and teams. Reviewing Stanford's computer science curriculum shows a remarkably similar set of subjects, so if we have a problem I don't believe it is restricted to Sydney or Australia.

What is the role of university anyway?

The big, age old question is whether it is the role of university to prepare students for industry? For Harper, the answer is "yes": "Australian universities are not producing workplace-ready engineers".

While in my opinion it's not the job of university to prepare "workplace-ready engineers" (I'm of the opinion that the fundamentals and theory perspective is the proper focus for 90% of a degree, and that a career ready engineer will develop on the job), I do think that there should be some level of preparation, and a suitable level of preparation would be relatively easy to deliver to students. One or two semester long courses on industry practices would be give an undergraduate student a good head start.

In reality there will never be enough time in an undergraduate degree to fully prepare a student for industry (my suggestion of one or two semester long courses would have to take a strong opinion on languages and processes, and would just be the start). Harper says that "They're quite simply not being taught the right languages, methodologies, processes and problem solving concepts", but even to teach the "right" languages in the "right" way would take such a chunk of a student's time that there'd be precious little time left for the real science to be learnt. Indeed, for Harper's BigCommerce, the right language would be PHP, and would most certainly be counter-productive for young engineers to learn. I'm surprised to read Harper saying that they're not being taught problem solving concepts at university, and I'd like to know more precisely what he means by that.

Students are being taught to be engineers, but mostly industry is more interested in half-engineers, half web-developers. The best web developers have built on fundamentals, the type of fundamentals a student learns at university. Some good web developers have self-educated and not attended university, and for the right individual there is no doubt there are probably few careers that accomodate the self taught so well. There are precious few shortcuts to learning those fundamentals though.

The real problem

So, industry wants graduate engineers who can hit the ground running and can deliver value straight away with the particular languages and processes that a specific company has chosen, and has no time to develop individuals with potential. Why blame universities for not catering to this type of demand? University needs to deliver timeless knowledge built on science and learning, not cater to the whims of a fast paced industry, trying to predict every fad that comes along.

Companies can complain, but there's a quick way to solve this problem: take students with potential and train them with your languages, your processes, your engineering ideals. This is also the slow way to solve the problem, but hey, better than complaining.

(I plan to write a separate blog post about what my training for a graduated software engineer would cover).

The Dreams of Australian Retailers

2012-11-25T00:00:00+11:00

Well! A busy week in ecommerce in the Australian media, first with Michael Pascoe's scathing article on the retail strategies of Myer and David Jones, then the "success"/debacle that was Click Frenzy that was Click Frenzy.

I've written about Click Frenzy from a technical perspective and from an evaluation perspective, but Pascoe's article does deserve some commentary too.

Pascoe is correct that the UK and US markets are different to Australia. Aside from being markedly larger, they also have a catalogue culture. Pascoe also makes the point that Australia is over serviced by department stores, and that "for most people, it's comparatively easy to visit a Myer or David Jones shop". But is that true enough to stop people shopping online? The more I reflect on this, the more I think this misses the opportunity that is largely unexplored in Australia. Would it be more convenient for me to visit David Jones (which is right across the road from my work), than for the average American to visit Nordstrom's? Yes. But it would be even more convenient to order from David Jones online. Not with their current store, however, as it still has some significant issues, but not having to leave my desk or my sofa at home is undoubtedly more convenient than even the short trip to my closest DJs. And that is what Australian's are increasingly doing, ordering online after hours, or ordering online during work hours. Really, the time doesn't matter as long as one is near a computer.

The Pascoe article uses the prevalance of Australian department stores to claim that the target of 10% of sales online is ambitious for David Jones. My argument to that would be that while the strategy is not recolutionary, and may indeed be largely mimicking overseas retailers, does not invalidate it as a direction. Many a strategy has been copied with great success.

Pascoe is entirely correct that a major factor for local retailers will be the intrusion of overseas competitors shipping cheaply to Australia. With many of these retailers engaging local PR companies to raise public awareness of their offer, I'd say that this would be the major obstacle to David Jones and others realising their ambitions: can they price competitively and achieve a similar or better customer experience. Reviewing the current offerings, it looks like it will take some time for Australian retailers to compete on those factors.

A Retrospective Look at Click Frenzy

2012-11-25T00:00:00+11:00

Well, Click Frenzy has come and gone, and what have we learnt? Here are a few points to consider:

People using the words "success" and "failure" are almost all using them in the wrong context.
However one wants to try and spin or define the event, it is impossible to not use the word "embarrassing" as well.
Without a doubt, Click Frenzy as a brand is dead in the water. I'd be surprised if they could resuscitate it.
Despite the failures, it has been talked about, and has raised the public consciousness about buying online.

Many have labelled the event a failure, which I tend to agree with, but that doesn't acknowledge that some retailers have seen incredibly strong sales through the period. For instance, Westfield.com.au, which I'm heavily involved with, was active the entire time and trading very strongly.

Then, on the other side, others have tried to spin it as a success, and downplay the significant issues, saying that it was regrettable that Click Frenzy and many retailer sites, big and small, fell over, but that the strong underlying demand for the event and the media mentions generated made it a positive experience.

My issue with both these viewpoints is that they are categorically the wrong way to think about it. Success in this case needs to be considered from the viewpoint of the customer. Was it successful in helping customers find bargains? No, not really. Many customers couldn't connect and had a horrible experience. Their awareness of online shopping increased, but a completely negative experience. To quote a commenter on Mumbrella:

A new shopping centre is designed. But when it is built, someone forgets to add in some doors. At launch, some retailers manage to punch a few holes in the building, and a few customers follow and purchase some stuff. However most people are left raging outside. "But look," say the owners of the building, "all these people want to get into our shopping centre, look at the demand, what a success!."

Failure is a correct way to think about it from the customer viewpoint, but wrong from the perspective of PR and sales. Sales increased for many retailers - if they could keep their site up - and the PR and media coverage was immense (particularly if you subscribe to the "at least they are talking" school of PR).

A better way to evaluate Click Frenzy is to ask: was the most made of the opportunity? In that sense, there was some "success" in raising awareness, but the potential and promise of the event was severely impacted by the execution. And this should be the real reason that it failed: it never delivered on the significant groundwork and expectations.

Why did it fail? Some have pointed the finger at the technical providers or the site hosts, and I suspect Click Frenzy had inadequate technical advice, or perhaps chose to ignore the advice, but perhaps they underinvested in their platforms, or didn't go with experts. The fact that the Click Frenzy Magento installation and code was visible to anyone with a browser (as of writing, it is still available in Google's cache) also points to bad technical implementation. In any case, the failure reflects on Click Frenzy and its promoters more than anything.

What are the lessons?

It should be a wake up call for all online companies in Australia. The "geeks" have been talking about platform stability for a long time, and the companies that have underinvested in experience and resources in this area can often be embarassed at inoportune times. Real expertise on what online retailing means still needs to develop, and the rare skills in this area need to be cultivated and valued. That means engaging strong techical talent and acting on their advice.
The Click Frenzy promoters have probably learnt a lot from the experience. They should be congratulated for working so hard on their vision and generating a massive amount of PR, and have hopefully learnt the folly of not executing on the technical side. However, it is their responsibility to get that right, and they can't shift the blame there.

An interesting week for ecommerce in Australia!

Click Frenzy Failure

2012-11-20T00:00:00+11:00

Tonight's Click Frenzy failure has shown that many retailers have a long way to go to really understanding e-commerce and the technology that enables it. While Click Frenzy itself has clearly failed to have a decent caching and content delivery strategy, it is also amazing that recently built sites such as Myer and David Jones have struggled with increased traffic today as well. But I'm glad to report (though not at all surprised) that Westfield's site has very quick response times and is serving many customers through our checkout.

Lessons for your retail ecommerce site:

Ensure you have a proven content delivery partner such as Akamai
Cache aggressively on the server side with a technology like Varnish
Load test your site, and your checkout (they WILL have different scaling needs)
Ensure your integration partners (e.g. payment gateways etc) are capable of handling projected volumes comfortably
Do not rely on luck, instead plan ahead

Vertically Integrated Commerce

2012-11-04T00:00:00+11:00

Recently Tech Crunch had an article by Boris Wertz that started by claiming that there "has been more e-commerce innovation during the past year than there has been during the last decade." I'd probably agree, as we've seen emerging business models, rising m-commerce execution, and an ever-accelerating consumer acceptance of online shopping. The article goes on to raise the idea of vertically integrated commerce and explain why it's the new frontier.

Wertz also mentions the better prices and margins angle, but by this stage that is just a given in the e-commerce world. Retailers who don't understand how to price for the online world are consistently shown up by their more savvy competitors. The more vital parts of this article are the mention of barriers to entry and brand building.

Vertical Integration

It's an interesting and timely article, but in reality vertically integrated businesses are not a revolutionary an idea - at the base it is just the same idea as everyone already knows from offline business: build barriers to entry to create competitive advantage. Indeed the article author Boris Wertz acknowledges that for all the difficulties of establishing the vertically integrated business, the main advantage is the barrier to entry: "this means that once a vertically integrated company makes it, they’re less likely to be uprooted by the latest up-and-comer".

These ideas, while not necessarily breaking new ground, are part of the evolution of e-commerce, from simply selling things efficiently online, to building sustainable and growable businesses. The skills needed to sell online, and the skills needed to establish vertically integrated businesses are in many ways disconnected currently; you would be lucky to find someone who can explain how to effectively optimise search engine ranking while also negotiating with a manufacturer over a new design. Of course, you don't need those skills in one person, but you do need the end to end understanding to build a succesful vertically integrated business.

Building Brands

The other major point of interest in Wertz's article is the idea of building brands. In a similar vein, a brilliant article by Lawrence Lenihan popped up last week, expounding the shift occurring where brands will increasingly engage directly with consumers, leaving less room for retailers, and highlighting the importance of building strong brands:

I’m also putting my money behind retailers who recognise that brands can and will go directly to their customers and rather than try to fight and prevent them from doing so, are creating platforms that enable brands to build and strengthen their relationship with their customers

In particular, Lenihan is putting his money where his mouth is and is investing in companies that are vertically integrated and have a strong sense of enduring brand.

Opportunities In Ecommerce Right Now

For mine, the biggest opportunities in ecommerce right now are exactly in the intersection of these two articles: vertically integrated businesses that understand building a brand online (whether there is an offline component or not). Brands like Warby Parker, and locally in Australia Sneaking Duck and Shoes of Prey, are gaining an advantage right now by executing on this strategy. Who will be next?

Online vs Bricks & Mortar

2012-05-20T00:00:00+10:00

Power Retail's Campbell Phillips analyses a report on online shopping, highlighting the growth rate (albeit off a low base). Phillips rightly focuses on the challenge to bricks-and-mortar retailers from their pureplay retail competitors, and more importantly, that only two of Australia's top fifteen online retailers also has a bricks-and-mortar component, compared to the US, where thirteen of the top fifteen have an offline offering.

Why is their such divergance in these numbers? Is it that local retailers have ignored online? Or have the pureplay retailers done such a good job that offline retailers seem to have comparatively failed?

Closer inspection of a wider range of research would no doubt provide better answers, but by intuition and personal experience, I would support both ideas: offline retailers have been slow and poor in executing online strategies in Australia, and pureplay online retailers have taken the best and strongest ideas from the international forefront to build great online offerings. Examples of this are The Iconic's three hour delivery in Sydney, or SurfStitch's live chat and free call support. Meanwhile Supre (one of the better online/offline retailers) features an autoplay video with vibrant music on it's homepage -- sure to deter those who would shop at their desks.

How can local bricks-and-mortar retailers deliver better online experiences? Simply by doing the same as their pureplay counterparts: observe the market (there is no easier marketplace to do market research than the internet!), use the best ideas, allow your online team to be focused but integrated with all the offline activity, and provide them with adequate resources to compete.

As Phillips concludes: "the future is omni-channel, there's simply no fighting it". It will be interesting to see how this develops over the next twelve to eighteen months.

The Fashion Industry Stripped Bare

2012-05-15T00:00:00+10:00

A few weeks ago there was a fantastic article by Marion Hume in the AFR Magazine about the state of the fashion industry, covering both the local and international angles. Of particular interest was Hume's acknowledgement of the impact of ecommerce in the Australian market.

Highlights from the article include the anecdote around why models in old Australian magazine shoots had to wear basic sandals (because Australia had a very limited to non-existant supply of fashion-forward shoes), and the sidebar on online shopping, which gives a little insight into the emerging mindset from the point of view of fashion insiders:

Oroton CEO Sally Macdonald, an early adopter who moved back from the US to find we were still in the age of dial-up, says it wasn’t just lack of broadband width that lead to the slow shuffle online. She cites sexism, investment here being so male-dominated. She claims men simply failed to understand the relief with which time-poor women would grab the digital life-raft. (The world’s leading luxury e-tailer, net-a-porter, was founded by a woman and its key investor was a woman.)

The takeaway from this comprehensive article is that the fashion industry is changing rapidly and presenting endless challenges to the incumbents. The complexity of these issues shines through: it's not just a case of ditching everything for an online approach, but rather formulating a response that gives a brand with a significant investment in the offline world the tools to also compete in an online market too. For Australian companies, the most important action is to create an online presence and begin learning. Delay learning at this stage, and a company sets itself up to be chasing the rest of the industry in a relatively short time frame.

StyleTread adds funding

2012-03-28T00:00:00+11:00

I was very interested to read that StyleTread has raised $12m in funding. Having just finished Tony Hsieh's book "Delivering Happiness", which essentially covers his early entrepreneurial career, his leadership of Zappos and his managerial philosophies, it's hard not to look at this large funding number and Australia's limited market and think that the investment overwhelms the opportunity. As Power Retail notes, overseas expansion could be on the cards, because when you consider that Australia is still coming to grips with a mail order culture, the opportunity locally just doesn't seem that compelling. Noting that it took Zappos 10 years to reach $1 billion in revenue, and Australia has 1/15th the population, it would seem to be an ambitious investment.

As a sidenote, I'm also curious about Mark Rowland calling himself "Chief Happiness Officer". Even for a company that is clearly just a local adaptation of an American success story, that seems a little too derivative. Surely we can do better than just mimicking?

J.Crew comes to Australia

2012-03-28T00:00:00+11:00

The news hot off the wire is that American label J.Crew will now be delivering to Australia. What is hidden is that while J.Crew has partnered with ShopStyle, the international style network with an Australian arm, for their local presence, a user could just go straight to the J.Crew site and order directly from there. Indeed ShopStyle just shows the product, but the ordering and checkout all occur on the J.Crew site itself.

Still, it's a great signing by ShopStyle - they add a household name brand that is sure to bring traffic and sales to the site, while for J.Crew the partnership is an easy way to bring their products to a new audience via ShopStyles established membership base.

According to Power Retail, J.Crew will now be available in 107 countries, and even for a large organisation with a sophisticated web presence like J.Crew, the international aspects of ecommerce would have been difficult to navigate. Partnering with an ecommerce expert in ShopStyle, with a global presence, significantly drops the risk.

J.Crew began in 1983, and since 2003 has been run by Micky Drexler, who once had astounding success with Gap. But probably just as critical for their current industry standing is the creative direction of Jenna Lyons, a constant media fixture for her style and personality. Will J.Crew achieve commercial success in selling to Australia? One would think that with the connected consumer being well aware of popular culture in the USA (and Michelle Obama is an often cited J.Crew fan) that there'll be little trouble in luring the Australian shopper.

J.Crew's own online store is a fully featured and quick, and for shopping from Australia, it is a seamless shop and checkout experience -- which underlines that the only reason for the ShopStyle partnership is probably to utilise ShopStyle's member networks in each of the ShopStyle countries.

For brands that are well known in their home countries, it seems that it's a growing trend to partner into new territories. Expect more partnerships in in 2012.

A brief overview of Australia's retail fashion ecommerce sector

2012-03-15T00:00:00+11:00

It is well acknowledged that Australia is playing catchup in the area of ecommerce. While the US and the UK have been steadily building since not long after the year 2000, Australia's retail ecommerce industry has really only started taking off in the last three years (as an aside, I'm defining "taking off" broadly: a vital and growing number of small retailers, along with advanced offerings from big players.)

Over the last two years Australia has seen the launch of Westfield's ecommerce offering, Myer join the party and eBay bring to fruition their long held plan to shift to a more retail focus. More recently, David Jones has made bold claims about where its undelivered ecommerce store will end up. Meanwhile, there's a host of smaller online retailers such as SurfStitch, The Grand Social and My Catwalk that are showing their agility and are proving able to connect with young consumers ready to spend online.

When we compare to the markets in the UK and US, however, we see that the Australia is relatively undeveloped. Retailers are still learning the right way to present and price product, the ins and outs of customer service and how to market their sites. Australia doesn't have the same pervasive and decades-long mail order culture that the US and UK have, so there are many retailers learning on the run. But regardless of retailer readyness, the consumer is most certainly ready, to the point that Australia has been reported as the third largest market for ASOS's UK operations (which has led to ASOS opening an Australian operation). Looking internationally, Nordstrom has a sophisticated offering (with reported plans to spend $140 million on ecommerce in 2012), and delivers to Australia. Obviously Australian retailers will not be able to match the investments of larger overseas counterparts, but nevertheless they are competitors with clout, and with orders deliverable to Australian capital cities in a matter of days, the tyranny of distance no longer applies. Australian retailers must find ways of improving their showing, and connecting uniquely with their local market. For instance, Sydney culturally has a beachside lifestyle that Nordstrom and others are unlikely to target.

So, how should Australian retailers respond? Firstly, they need to acknowledge the market and realise the urgency of establishing themselves. The market is proven, and delaying just allows competitors to establish themselves and learn the necessary lessons. Next, the technological platforms must be properly developed. Whether the retailer is large, as with David Jones, or a small pure play online retailer, cutting corners on the technology may hamper growth and addition of new features. Technology selection is an involved topic, and concerns much more than software, with a chief concern being the availability of local expertise. With commitment and technology in place, the next hurdle is either finding ecommerce savvy product and marketing resources, or ingraining a culture of learning and experimentation to be able to rapidly develop and iterate the offering. Ecommerce is changing rapidly, and if retailers are going to be competitive, they need to realise that trying new approaches, failing, and readjusting are crucial.

It's too early to say who the winners in Australian ecommerce are likely to be, but it is clear that some of the best approaches for the sector have been from the rapidly adapting smaller players, and that the larger retailers can only rely on brand for so long.