The first issue information-technology departments in the hotel sector need to address is understanding that, when it comes to technology, they are never going to innovate.
What happens in every sector, including ours, is that there tends to be a build-up in enthusiasm about technology, which leads to the belief in every IT department that it is going to build a massive infrastructure that it will manage and that it will be able to fix when it breaks.
The reality is that it this vision can quickly become a black hole for cash.
Why? Because often such a task is beyond the talent and needs of a small, or even medium-sized, organization.
You do not look at your gas requirements and start working on how to build a cylinder and a storage facility, so you should not be looking at building your own infrastructure either.
Instead, IT should be focusing on the business objective of the project. What are the key performance indicators you will be fulfilling?
That has nothing to do with technology.
Technology just enables you to do what you need to do within your business.
And that is where hotel operators fail. Often, they never consider why they are doing something.
The initial stage needs to be identifying what the technology will do, not being distracted by the glitter of a demonstration. Is it going to increase revenues? Can it decrease costs? Is it going to increase guest satisfaction? If it cannot do a single one of those things, or you cannot identify which one it fits into, it is probably a bad purchase.
Where I frequently see a disconnect is between the IT department and management. The two seem to talk in two different languages.
IT cannot talk about the impact on key performance indicators from the IT investments they make; they can only talk about the functions. Management, meanwhile, cannot understand how this helps meet the next quarterly objective.
For decades in the hotel sector no one has ever really looked at their actual requirements for acquiring a system. They look at the functionality of the system they’re going to buy. And then they work out how they can fit it around their business. That’s the wrong way. You've got to approach it from how you want to operate your business.
Once you have made these decisions, you need to think about whether you need a number of different products or if there is one that can do everything. With the latter, having a closed system does give you limitations in terms of future development, but there are businesses out there that may never change the way they operate their businesses, in which case it isn’t necessarily the wrong thing.
In terms of being more of an agile business, it makes absolute sense to adopt open application programming interface within your technology function, with the idea that you can “interchange” different products as and when the business moves on or changes direction.
You might increase the amount of food and beverage or expand into leisure. In which case, you are going to need to add systems, and having open architecture enables you to do that.
This is where we come back to the function of the IT department. It needs to move away from the “building everything” mentality.
IT teams should be looking at how they enable technology to work, and how it can bring together a multitude of different software and service providers to deliver a consistent service to the business.
The breadth of technology that the hotel industry demands means that very often IT requirements go well beyond what a small team can deliver and keep pace with.
James Richmond is co-founder and CEO at Nevaya.
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