PriceWaterhouseCoopers, my first tech employer, posted an interview with Tom Conophy of the InterContinental Hotels Group. It’s probably the best post I’ve read this year about the evolution of their mobile strategy and how they changed their culture to handle it. It’s worth reading the entire post but here are a couple excerpts:
Then the perfect storm scenario happened. You had a higher adoption of smartphones. You had better resolution, better capabilities. You had the advent of 3G and better networking, and then the applications themselves became much more intelligent. So we first revitalized our mobile offering, which was the standard mobile booking application.
We gave it an overhaul from a look-and-feel point of view, streamlined the booking process to make it simpler, and leveraged inferencing capabilities—we knew data about you based on your phone, so we would not need to ask you mundane questions as part of a booking process. From a human factors point of view, we ate our own dog food, so to speak, and we were critical of each other relative to how it worked.
We targeted it for loyalty members first. That helped significantly. That was October 2009. We went from $200,000 a month in bookings to $1 million, and that was due to people using it on iPhone and BlackBerry devices. It wasn’t a specific iPhone app yet.
Then we built an iPhone app and released in May 2010. Right away, it was well adopted by the traveling public. It was rated very highly—we were downloading 4,000 apps a day or something like that. The ratings were very high, and we then surpassed the earlier players that had products out there already. Ours was rated higher because we took the time to make it pretty intelligent in terms of richness of capability without necessarily making the user interface complicated.
And……
Several of the CIOs we have talked to over the years say they’re not able to do what you are doing. You really focus squarely on R&D [research and development] and the leading edge. They say, well, we have to keep the lights on and we need to X, Y, and Z, and just those things consume all our time and budget.
Those guys just don’t get it. Whenever someone like that talks like that, the CEO should automatically just fire them. They are not doing their job. Within the last four years, I have reduced my overall operating cost by 20 percent, but yet we probably do 200 percent more than we ever have. We do something called Fuel for Fire. We create operating efficiencies and savings that turn around and enable us to put more monies toward investments. I carve out what we call a CIO fund, and I pitch it whenever I submit my budget. It’s about a million dollars a year now. I have earned it through our track records. Remember, when I came to the company, the place was a shambles, and we were able to turn around the whole mind-set.
