<p>John Lewis aims to increase its use of cloud services in order to simplify its IT infrastructure and deal with the growing data demands seen throughout the retail sector.</p><p>Speaking at the Retail Business Technology Expo in London, the retail giant's head of IT architecture, Julian Burnett, said that the company is one of many having to come to terms with the masses of data being generated across its operations.</p><p>"Retailers are awash with [data]," he said. "But how do we make any sense of it? How do we bring to bear some of the value that is locked into the data we have?</p><p>He continued: "Big data is a big hype, but an organisation like John Lewis - and any other retailer - needs to get its head around how we bring together large amounts of structured and unstructured data in a quick and effective manner, in order to generate some level of insight for how to best serve our customers, and how to best select our products."</p><p><a href="http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/it-business/3434701/john-lewis-looks-cloud-keep-pace-with-retail-tech-changes/">Keep reading...</a></p>