It's ironic that the woman being lauded as this year's Most Visionary CIO is no longer holding that position. Sandi Macfie, the CIO of Southern Sun Hotels until October, has now been elevated to a more far-reaching role as the director of revenue.
Her new role still gives her an involvement with IT, and Macfie sought the move because although Southern Sun already uses IT cleverly, her new role gives her more authority to get the people and processes aligned to reap the benefits.
One of her goals is to grow revenue by ensuring that business intelligence tools are used effectively to mine the amassed data to gain fresh insight and make decisions differently because of the knowledge gained. “It's not technology solutions that drive great business benefits, but how the organisation uses it. It's about people,” Macfie says.
During her 11 years as CIO, Macfie has introduced many innovations. Perhaps the most dramatic is a move to cloud computing, with the hotel group buying software as a service (SaaS) and phasing out its own hardware to lease the capacity it needs instead.
“We always have the challenge of how we can reduce the cost of ownership of IT, which is an area that needs innovation and alignment to the business vision,” she says.
It's not technology solutions that drive great business benefits, but how the organisation uses them.
Sandi Macfie, Southern Sun Hotels
Macfie wanted to free up money spent on grudge purchases of hardware and software so more cash could be spent developing guest-centric initiatives. “You can't expect the board to get excited when we need capex to refresh 100 servers, but they can get excited about information and clever ways to use it. So we are moving completely away from owning the components because that money is far better spent on developing value-add guest-facing technologies like tablets and mobile apps so people can do express check-ins,” she says.
“That's the whole concept of our cloud. It's not just SaaS; we are going the whole hog with an IT as a service model. So when we peak at month-end on our SAP financial system, we just buy more memory and processing capacity. When month-end is over, we drop it back down again, so it's on-demand computing.”
data centre. “We became the first hotel group that is aggressively moving to a private cloud in our IT strategy, which has significantly reduced the IT costs. I asked the team to come up with an IT services model so that when the occupancy rate is low, the IT costs less.”
IT jargon
The move also created an opportunity to rethink the way each hotel brand within the group is charged for IT services.
The hotels no longer see an incomprehensible bill for using servers or networking capacity. “Instead of talking IT jargon, we came up with an innovative business model that allows us to sell our IT services in a way that businesses can understand,” Macfie explains.
It's a clever distinction, since the IT department is now speaking the language of business, not technology.
“We have grouped the components into a business description, so it's not hardware, software or networks, it's a reservation delivery system, an online purchasing system or e-mail packages of three different sizes. We are negotiating in terms the business understands so they can see the different options to try to reduce their IT spending. That's been quite revolutionary. If more CIOs adopted this model, they'd find it much easier for the business people to understand where the money went, why, and how they can spend differently.”
Macfie has been in the IT industry for 31 years, in companies spanning the hospitality, retail, banking and ICT sectors. “My passion is business and business opportunities, and as a CIO, your role is to leverage the business through the clever use of technology,” she says. “I don't think a company should find a snazzy technology, then try to find a use for it. I'm far more switched on by how we can do things differently and create a differentiator for the business.”
Southern Sun's stated vision is to be Africa's leading hotel group, and to create great memories for its guests. That means a key area of focus for the CIO is to create a personal experience to 'wow' the guests.
One method is for the IT department to ensure that information about every guest who stays in any of its hotels is visible when they next check in, so the receptionist can ask them how they enjoyed their previous stay.
“When someone stays at a hotel, we can create a record in a central system so we can recognise people across the hotels wherever they have stayed. We load their preferences and that gets pushed back to the hotel, so when they check in again, any preferences they selected can be addressed. If a high-frequency guest arrives, we can SMS the duty manager to tell them a key person is checking in so they can have a meaningful engagement.”
Other projects already implemented include self-service check-in kiosks and supplying high-speed Internet throughout all the hotels within the group.
Free Internet access is tricky when the hotel has to pay for the bandwidth, Macfie says. “It's not easy with the cost of bandwidth in South Africa, but we were fairly visionary in a corporate deal with Vodacom so we run our guests' Internet as a logical tie-in to our corporate network, which reduces the cost and enables us to deliver free Internet offerings within many of our hotels.”
Ensuring the innovative use of technology to grow revenue is no doubt one of the challenges Macfie will continue to pursue in her new role.
First published in the Dec/Jan 2012 issue of ITWeb Brainstorm magazine.
* Article first published on brainstorm.itweb.co.za
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