Almost every touchpoint with our guests now involves technology in some way. As the CEO, it is ultimately your responsibility to ensure that technology is given the priority, resources, and budget required. Very often though, the CIO reports to other C-level executives and does not have the same level of influence in the company.

Do you consider the IT department to be as important as operations, finance, and marketing? And how involved are you personally in the company's overall technology architecture and strategy?

Viewpoint authored by 
Lyle Worthington, HFTP Past President

IDeaS - A SAS Company

This viewpoint is co-created with IDeaS a SAS company
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Michael Levie
Michael Levie
Hospitality Changemaker and Co-Founder of citizenM

Tech today enables our personal and professional lives… it allows us to be efficient, timely, data factual and more. Tech development has reached significant speed and specialization is needed to be guided or make the right calls.

In the hospitality, space tech has grown from being a side responsibility of our financial controller or CFO to a full-fledged independent C-level / CIO position.

The need to be guided to make the right calls deal with trusting and empowering the CIO in our organizations by all C-level members, including the CEO.

Tech goes cross-departmental and divisional and often serves various or all areas of the organization.

The hospitality industry for decades has been vendor-led, this not as a negative, but rather an observation. As an industry, we have not been able to articulate our specific needs or understand the true (inter)dependencies of our systems.

As a result, the PMS still is the central system of record, being a room centric. The rest of the World and therefore all other systems are guest-centric…

Connectivity and data flow stand not at the base of PMS functionality and there are simply too many systems being connected through to prevent a true spaghetti of wiring. API's a novelty, interfaces still the norm… Networks new and expensive, not seen as a means to a solution.

If you would start completely anew, the desired architecture has to provide the base, everything else builds from there. 

Taking our legacy troubles, possibly the best is to start with a complete shadow architectural structure and shift system by system till all have transferred.

Taking our thinking from room centric and restrictions to data analyses and possibilities launches us to be competitive and our CIO's as be key to our organizations.

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