How Organizations Apply Strategic Use Of IS/IT For IS/IT-enabled Innovation: A Critical Discussion

Application of innovations in Information system and information technology

One of the most widely used technologies used in today’s world are the innovations in information technology and information systems. This report will highlight the usage of information systems for four organizations in the hospitality industry, which have branches and operations all across the world in order to make their business processes even more efficient. The selected companies to be studied in this report are Burj Khalifa, Marriott international, Taj group of hotels and Hyatt regency. The different aspects of the implementation of the innovative systems such as the external factors, markets analysis customer feedbacks etc., will be carefully studied in the following paragraphs.

The security that Burj Khalifa offers for all its guests is unparalleled. For instance, if an unauthorized person tries to get inside a secure area the subsystems located in the building including the alarm systems and the CCTV cameras are immediately activated. If a fire is detected anywhere inside the building, the airflow system will automatically be deactivated to stop the fire from further spreading. This are all due to the different sensor based information systems installed in all floors within the building (Park and Allen 2013). There are other information systems including audio video systems including projector screen that use automatic technologies as well as conference rooms including the state of the art technologies to have all information consolidated at one single place (Berezina et al.  2016). A two-way radio system is also an example of an innovation in the hotel premises, which connects the different departments such as facilities, security as well as maintenance.

Innovations in technology is also seen in the hotel premises where in hi-tech Otis elevators are installed in every corner of the hotel. Information regarding each floor are displayed on the screen within the elevators for the benefit of the guests (Wang et al. 2016). Low voltage consuming Johnson control systems are installed which consume less power. The different forms and innovations of technology innovation are exhibited by the Burj E-home which is a smart technology installed by Johnson controls (Bhatt and Wallgrün 2014). A single control system helps the control curtains, lighting, security devices as well as home theaters

• The excellent security features in the information systems helped the company gain the trust of the customer all across the world.
• The innovations in construction as well as hotel design architectures were so applied form time to time to ensure provisions of future implementation of innovations to ensure continuous growth and improvement of the hotel.
• The spiral Y shape of the building designed by advanced technologies and innovations in the information systems in construction architecture not only helped the engineers at the time of constructing the building but helps the building even today in many ways.

From past researches and articles it has been found that often the behavior of the staff within the hotel is not good and the guests have turned out to be dissatisfied with the service provided (Pearlson, Saunders and Galletta 2016). This may be result of the excessive demand of services that the hotel caters on a daily basis. Handling thousands of customers on a daily basis is a complex task and often the building administrators fail to meet the needs of every guests from very rooms/suites. Another lesson learnt of for the building authorities is that it often causes a risk for the airplanes flying in and around the building (Boella and Goss-Turner 2013). The extreme height of the building can often be a reason of plane accidents.

• Advanced information systems should be installed especially on the top of the tower to keep the hotel security personnel as well as airport staff informed about the vicinity of planes flying in and around the building to ensure better safety of the building.
• More efficient and advanced human resource management software should be incorporated within the system in order to ensure better training and development of the staff as well as job satisfaction.

Example 1 – Burj Khalifa

One of the primary focus of Marriott international is to increase its sales. For this, it has come up with an innovative customer relationship management software form Siebel Systems Inc., and has plans to upgrade the central reservation system, revenue as well as property management system. Through this feature customer will be able to choose their own rooms and book them online in the future. Marriott international also has implemented innovations in information systems in its department of home catering services, which is the ChefTec recipe management system. It is a food costing as well as inventory system, and runs on the windows platform. Another innovation used by the company is Intranet prototype known as Oasis, which gives the Marriott managers instant access to the necessary information needed by them. Accounting is again another segment where the company uses innovations in information systems in order to generate automatic reports in the year-ends by using software’s. It is mainly done by the Xcellenet system, which allows junior level executives to download information from the corporate headquarters and transmit the accounting reports digitally via the phone lines (Carter 2014). The company also has its own Alexus system in human resources which stores and sorts resumes based on the requirements or the vacancies presently available.

• The company using its advanced customer relationship management software has created international database of customers.
• Another success factor is its excellent resource management solution, which has enabled the company to think in a way that states, “Think global, act local”. Through this philosophy, it makes optimum use of the available resources as well as the innovations in information systems in order to ensure that the customer in the local markets are immensely benefitted (González and Gidumal 2016). The extreme competitive advantage that it holds by making efficient use of its internal information systems is again a success factor for the company.

• Excessive focus on expansion: Marriott has always been putting excessive focus on expanding its business operations and in the process, it has lost on service standards and brand dilution in many countries.
• Overemphasis on service standardization: Marriott has always overemphasized on standardization of service even at the cost of employee job satisfaction (Filieri and McLeay 2014).This in turn has reduced the employee morale in many of its branches and departments.

The company should start focusing more on its quality of service that it offers to the guest as well as their satisfaction. Due to the degrade in quality of their service it has considerable deteriorated on its sales as well as customer feedback form all across the world (McDaniel and Gates 2013). The company should also implement better applications of information systems to make optimum use of the available resource and improve employee job satisfaction by improved human resource management solutions within the working operations.

Taj group of hotels is one of the finest in the hospitality industry across the world. It has portrayed excellent innovations in information systems. Two most important sectors within the organization where it has extensively used the applications of the information systems are its excellent customer relationship management system and its human resource information system (HRIS). In the customer relationship management, software a preference sheet is mailed to the guests at the they book a room online in order to provide them with a better staying experience. This is done in order to understand if the guest is diabetic or has any other kinds of requirements upon his arrival in the hotel. Complimentary pick up for the airport is also provided, which is again being taken care by the centralized customer relationship management software. Fidelio is the property management software used by Taj, which is incorporated with the customer relationship management software, which is used to capture the profiles of each guests, which have stayed in the Taj hotels. Feedbacks are gathers form the guests and processed and analyzed by software for training and development processes (Chadha 2015). Other information such as guest birthdays, anniversaries are also stored on the central database of the CRM software.

Example 2 – Marriott international

Another important area of innovation in information systems is the advanced human resource management within the company (Verma 2014). The different processes, which are made more efficient within the Taj group of hotels using the information systems, are listed below:

• Recruiting
• Selecting
• Evaluating employee performance
• Compensation and benefits
• Training and development of employees
• Handling internal job postings and career growth of employees.
• Employee job satisfaction and strategies of retention.
• Helping employees to maintain proper work-family balance

• Excellent hierarchical structure that exists within the system to keep the employees as well as the managers motivated. The excellent human resource management software ensures that the excellent performance form the employees as well as their achievements are recognized in order to keep them motivated all throughput to ensure their increased productivity.

• The Taj group incurs excessive high costs of maintenance every year across all its hotels around the world. This is due to an inappropriate budget planning system in the present system.
• Often due to its excessive demand the level of service from the employees goes down for the guests. This also has to be efficiently handled by the company.

• The company should make more efficient use of the innovations in information systems to tap the geographical locations of smaller towns and cities where they are still not present, in order to expand their business to other parts of the world.
• It should also come up with better resource planning as well as property management software’s in order to counterattack competition from its major market competitors such as Hilton, Oberoi etc.
• Better customer satisfaction should be ensured using a better customer relationship management software within the working operations.

Hyatt regency has also shown innovations in information systems in the recent past due to which the company has exhibited uninterrupted service even in unforeseen conditions or disasters.   The security information systems is extremely efficient within the Hyatt hotels and the data is stored in a secure and encrypted (Russo et al.  2013). Daily backup cycles for all the servers are also done by the use of information systems without much interference from the human work force.  Efficient computer backup systems can also help in recovering the data in case of natural disasters as well as server breakdowns. There is a centralized reservation system used by the Hyatt international group of hotels through which, the customers will just not be able to book the rooms online but prior to booking, they will be able to check the videos of the interior of each rooms (FitzPatrick et al. 2013). This helps them better decide on the rooms/suites they wish to book for their stay and helps the company win the trust of the guests right from the time they pre book the rooms. At the same time attractive offers and discounted prices are also been offered to the users and seasonal vouchers are visible on the online reservation portal portal.

• A very strong performance management system in order to ensure its performance in the markets is always being monitored and improved considered to the other competitors.
• Complimentary firms have been successfully integrated with Hyatt using successful information systems in mergers as well as acquisition processes(Galliers and Leidner 2014). This has in turn improved the brand equity largely for the organization, which has process to be one of its major success factor.

• The organizational structure that exists in the present system in Hyatt has to be revised. It often causes employee job dissatisfaction and other issues within the organization.
• The company presently lacks a proper information system that can effectively handle market challenges as well as competition (Stair and Reynolds 2013).Due to its lack of such an efficient decision making system it has lost much of its niche business sin the market to other competitors and new entrants.
• It also needs to build an effective feedback system to help in directly passing of feedbacks between the sales team to the ground executives on filed or even to the customer at times.

• Online portals should be introduced in order to attack new customers and online sales for the company (Gretzel et al. 2015). This can be achieved using an advanced transaction processing as well as customer relationship management system.
• It can make use of big data analytics for better technological upgrade in the operations of the hotel operations.

The hotel management systems in the different hotels should ensure that there is optimum job satisfaction as well as high level of customer satisfaction after their stays.

The employees at the hotels should themselves be highly motivated to serve the guests and address their concerns during their stays in the hotels.

The management should be cooperative with the employees as well as the guests in different aspects to ensure repeat business form the same guests and enhanced satisfaction in the tie of their stay.

Innovations in services and technologies form other hotels should always be carefully studies and analyzed by the team of experts in all hotels in order to aid the management come up with improved and better plans at each points of time.

The market economy and the competition form the different other hotels as well as the fluctuating prices offered by the competitors should always be taken into consideration.

Example 3 – Taj Group of hotels

Hospitality industry is an ever-changing industry. Every day the different hotels are coming up with different technologies in their hotel premises as well as other innovations for the better experience of its guests (Guo, Kwon and Kareem 2015). Different categories of hotels have their different budgets and plans of innovations for the ever-changing market needs, which is specific to the hospitality industry.

Economic and social factors are to be taken into consideration. Often cheap rooms are available by different hotel, which are misused for different reasons all across the world (Laudon and Laudon 2016). Hotels also provide a source of employment for thousands of people, which in turn affect the economy, as well as the society in which a hotel is constructed.

Technological innovations such as mobile applications for hotel booking, online-centralized reservation systems etc., also play an important role in this industry.
Political factors such as environmental guidelines and rules set by the government have to be taken into consideration by the property manager at the time of running their business (Leung et al. 2013). Environmental guidelines also have to be complied at the time of constructing the hotels at any given site.

Conclusion:

Therefore, it can be concluded that even though hospitality industry is one of the largest growing industry especially for the application of innovations in information system and technology, there are multiple aspects that has to be taken into consideration in order to successfully implement the information systems. Information systems can be implemented to automate hotel booking processes as well as other related service online such as, booking side seeing packages etc. This can help the guests as well as the employees in the hotel industries immensely in order to ensure improved and better business in the future.

References:

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