An Interview with Cliff Tamplin, Vice President of Technology Support & Risk Management, Hyatt Corporation
THE ENTERPRISERS PROJECT: How are systems of engagement and their more decentralized, interactive nature changing the way you’re doing business?
TAMPLIN: Hospitality and the airlines generally operate – like many other companies – as guest-facing businesses, so there always has been a desire to drag, encourage, and persuade the customers to engage with core systems.
This goes right back to days of SABRE in the late Sixties, where the goal was to use the system of record, the reservation system, as a way of engaging customers and getting them to choose American Airlines in that particular case. So it’s not particularly a new challenge. It’s more complicated in that whereas previously it had been largely driven the business as a way of reducing cost and increasingly marketability and guided by a push model, now it’s very much a pull. The expectation from customers and guests is that they can go online to link from whatever it is they’ve got, wherever they are, through to the core systems at the property and to put in their requirements. There’s a terrific expectation that they’ll be able to order a bunch of flowers for the missus or specify the room bed type or room view they get or whatever.
So in hospitality it’s not so much moving from systems of record to systems of engagement as it is exposing systems of record to make them engaging. Anything where the guest or customer is involved, you either want information from them or want to provide information so they know what’s going on. You have to enable those portals to engage and bypass the more traditional approaches of a call center or a fax or anything that’s not interactive. Let’s face it: people are getting more and more impatient, and that comes across in two ways. They’re either irritated because they can’t get stuff or it’s more appealing to them if they can get stuff instantly.
TEP: How do concepts of governance and control need to change to deal with an IT world built on the coming together of supply chains and partner ecosystems, collaborating across business boundaries, real-time connectivity, etc.?
TAMPLIN: The challenges come in a variety of flavors. It depends on where the drive is coming from. If it’s something where it’s initiated by the IT group, and goes through a formal development process which should include building security, controls, role-based access, etc., into the environment, there should be no problem.
Where problems arise is where people in front-end groups get impatient and form splinter IT functions. At that point you no longer have a system of record, you have an island of data. A lot of that is why we have all this Big Data stuff going on: all these islands of data have popped up all over the place and we have to put them back together again to create information and hence derive insight.
It’s not always the case but certainly in our organization where we used to have different groups with their own pretty substantial IT departments, they were going off and creating their own systems of record. And when that happens, by definition you no longer have a system of record: you have two. Or three. That’s where you start needing to aggregate data: from food and beverage, from marketing, and all the other bits and pieces. Then you add all the external sources to that and it becomes more complicated.
Internally, if IT loses control, you get the islands of data then you have the problem of rationalizing it. But if you have people in the company who value and understand the concept of data management, then you build from the system of record out and you get a far more controlled environment. The challenge is that explaining the concepts of data management to people in the business in very difficult – even at times to the people in IT! But people have to understand how it relates to what they’re doing.
TEP: Given all that, how can organizations balance collaboration and agility with security and privacy considerations?
TAMPLIN: A lot of this comes back to education. All the time people came up to us and ask, “Why do I need to comply with PCI? Why do I need to comply with the European directives on privacy?” It’s a constant educational challenge. The security and privacy requirements have to be communicated before they come up with these questions. That way, by the time they start thinking about it they already have it in the back of their minds that they have to be prepared for the implications of getting it wrong.
As with all education, it has to be relevant to them. So in Marketing, when I talk about security I say, “What if Starwood or Marriott gets hold of your promotional plan before we put it out? How much does it cost you if they can counteract it?” In Operations I say, “Great, this is very interesting, but if you lose data on a guest and their privacy is compromised, they’ll never trust you again.” You have those inevitable conflicts. But the way around that is to sit down with the guy and ask, “What is it you’re actually trying to achieve and how can you do that differently?”
You have to use collaboration within the whole company so you can maintain privacy and security without crippling agility.
Cliff has held a variety of roles with major global corporations including Barclays, M&M Mars, Diageo, Northwest Airlines and Hyatt Hotels & Resorts. These roles have spanned application design and development; infrastructure architecture and operations; and information security. Cliff has been with Hyatt Hotels & Resorts for six years and is currently VP of IT, responsible for technical services and information security for Hyatt’s 500+ hotels in 45+ countries. Hyatt is an early adopter of the concepts of cloud computing and has moved the majority of its systems to “as a service” providers.
