Retailers have a particular problem in communication that many organizations do not have.  The problem can be described as "reach". Reach is possible when everyone in an organization is in one building - you can reach out and communicate personally.  Reach is more difficult when you cannot reach the person physically. Retailers have many different locations and despite the good intentions of the phone company (old ATT commercial) it is not always easy "to reach out and touch a store employee by phone"  - they are probably doing what management wants - focusing on the customer.

As a result, messaging and workflow is very important for retailers - as it is for many organizations.  Consider a simple problem - collecting store sales - comparing it to projections and determining the causes of discrepancies.  Most retailers have projection systems - some are "under the desk" systems - some are very sophisticated and part of a planning tool.  Every retailer collects sales information as fast as possible - retailers are very focused on sales. And many want to know what went wrong as fast as possible - in case they can correct it through some action.

So, a simple tool of providing a "mash-up of sales, projections and manager's input is another example of where Web 2.0 can take an under the desk system for projections, email for mangers input, and sales from the production sales reporting system.  With a system like this, senior managers, would know instantly why sales suffered.

Mash-ups with email, forms routing and under the desk systems, coupled with Enterprise applications is a powerful tool that provide immediate benefit to any company trying to run the business more efficiently.  Of course, data sources such as weather data and the like might be another source of information that can be "mashed up" as well.