How China's Retail Innovators Built Their Agile Architecture Foundations

Enterprise architecture (EA) professionals who are putting customer experience (CX) at the top of their agenda should take a deep dive into China's retail industry. While the vertical still serves Chinese consumers and resellers primarily through physical stores, they are doing so more and more via eCommerce. Although many retailers have successfully made this shift, they now need to further transform their enterprise architecture, because not only have pure eCommerce players like Tmall.com and JD.com grabbed a significant share of the Chinese retail market, the entire world is shifting to eCommerce and mobility. This report, the second in a series on agile EA for retail transformation in China, analyzes the strategic initiatives of visionary online and offline retailers and describes how they built agile offline to online (O2O) architectures.