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fhrai magazine talks to Vijay Choudhary, GM-IT of HRH Hotels
Posted by on Thursday, July 26th, 2012
fhrai (Federation of Hotel & Restaurant Associations of India) magazine talks to Vijay Choudhary, General Manager – Information Technology, I.T. Department, HRH Group of Hotels, Eternal Mewar
You can also read the content of the entire article below:
“IT Department is a strong ‘Profit-CENTRE’ candidate
Bracing up for challenges
Integrated BI solutions for complete business agility and analysis on top of the PMS, RMS, CRS and MMS.
• Specialized Hospitality cloud services in the form of IaaS (Infrastructure as a service), PaaS (Platform as a Service) and SaaS (Software as a Service).
• Desktop virtualisation at key Guest Service areas/Departments like Front Office, Point of Sale (F&B Services) and Housekeeping.
• Increased commoditisation of rooms requires low-cost and integrated single platform comprising of PMS, RMS, OTA inventory management tool to handle market dynamics in more automated ways.
Needs of IT in today’shospitality
The needs could be divided into three different perspectives:
• Business: IT should be completely integrated and part of the corporate strategy in the Hospitality business.
• IT Infrastructure: Has to be deployed looking into the elasticity of demand of IT services, wherein at the supply side, the perishable
IT services are available in the form of Cloud, virtualization technology, etc.
• CIO/Head IT: CIO should have a place in the boardroom to assess, suggest and implement technology keeping pace with the growth and market dynamics.
Products, Services and Trends
• Integrated BI solutions for complete business agility and analysis on top of the PMS, RMS, CRS and MMS.
• Specialised Hospitality cloud services in the form of IaaS (Infrastructure as a service), PaaS (Platform as a Service) and SaaS (Software as a Service).
• Desktop virtualisation at key Guest Service areas/Departments like Front Office, Point of Sale (F&B Services) and Housekeeping.
• Increased commoditisation of rooms requires low-cost and integrated single platform comprising of PMS, RMS, OTA inventory management tool to handle market dynamics in more automated ways.
‘IT Department’ as a ‘Revenue Creation’ opportunity
It’s a common perception that the IT department is nothing but a mere cost centre. Now, with the capability of developing new customers, new markets and creating new revenue streams, the IT department can now be seen as a ‘Profit-Centre’. IT as a platform is contributing a lot to hotels getting the property made available on one click of a mouse to the entire world. The hotel website, considered as the face of property, now seems the preferred way of customer acquisition and retention. Social media presence, OTA channels, GDS/IDS all made IT a competitive advantage for greater customer reach and retention.
The IT team in synergy with ‘Revenue Department’ can bring in a big difference in terms of growth of revenue, better RevPAR and ADRs.
Viewpoint
My concern - (Alignment of business strategy with IT objectives + Incremental IT service delivery expectations) versus (availability of domain expert manpower and its recognition/retention)
Opinion - IT should be considered equal to a main hotel operational department. IT matrices and evaluation parameters should be introduced at various processes like strategic initiatives, brand representation and assessment, customer facing events, budgeting, internal audits and appraisals.
