Often the Hotelier commits a mistake in forecasting the Human resources across the departments in the same manner. They tend to do the recruitment of Department heads also in the same time frame. The planning for whole process of hotel operations and its analysis are being carried out by any of the hired Hotel Consultant. This approach does work fine with most of the operational departments except the Information Technology. Unlike other departments most of the quality works needs to be done in IT department prior to the operation stage of the Hotel. The successful operation of IT department largely depends on its effective and efficient implementation. Once the Hotel starts the operation it’s difficult to do the rework in the IT planning and at the same time it involves more money and time.
It has been noticed that planning of IT department and decisions on Hotel Applications are made by some IT consultants in co-ordination with a non IT person (some Head of Department) from Hotel’s side. This does not satisfy the Hotel’s IT needs quite well. An IT consultant will try to perform his job that seems more ideally accomplished before the commencement of day-to-day operation of hotel. In most of the situation hired IT consultants tend to ignore most of the operational issues that could come across after the implementation.
At the same time Application vendors work in coordination with IT consultants to implement the application as per the consultant’s requirements. Most of the time, it is seen that IT consultant act as IT manager from the Hotel’s side to gather systems training from the Hotel vendor to complete the Application implementation at Hotel.
As the IT manager gets recruited in the later stage (Generally it happens along with the recruitment of other staff), IT Manager does not have any option to choose the right software for the Hotel nor optimize the implemented application. He/She has just live with whatever the IT consultants and Software Vendors has provided with. If the IT Manager needs to revamp the whole system then it’s too difficult because the hotel might have already become operational.
Ideally Hoteliers should get the IT Head recruited at the same time it decides the planning of IT department’s structure. Even if the Hotel has taken services of an external IT consultant, IT manager will be able to get the maximum and good results form them. This helps the IT manager to get the Hotel’s IT department planned successfully for Hotel opening and day to day operations. It increases the efficiency of all staff who uses the Hotel Application, since of the bottlenecks in hotel application would have already been solved by the IT manager or he/she will be aware of the same.
