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Through this article, Mike Uwe Dickersbach explores the insights and experiences of a leader in the hospitality industry who has successfully navigated various roles, from food and beverage to finance, gaining a comprehensive understanding of the sector. He discusses the challenges faced during rapid growth, emphasizing the importance of cultural shifts and change management to facilitate automation and efficiency.
A 360-degree Perspective on Career Growth
Working in several key areas of the hospitality industry has given me a unique perspective. For example, I worked within a hotel in several areas, from Food and Beverage to Finance, which provided a foundational level of knowledge that created a baseline for the industry. From there, I have worked for hotel owners, managers and vendors serving the hospitality vertical. Understanding the vendor side was one of the key learning curves that allowed me to gain a broader perspective to bring digital change to Highgate.
Navigating Enterprise Growth and Cultural Shifts
For us, we are a nimble, fast-moving enterprise, but one that grew into enterprise proportions almost overnight. With that comes the challenge of shifting the culture and process to allow for proper change management, automation and removal of manual processes to help achieve a unified enterprise platform of efficiency.
As we grew rapidly, the challenge was not just technology adoption but also shifting the culture to embrace change and automation.
After that culture transition is the move to tech stacks that require planning, training and post-launch maintenance. It’s a constant process of ensuring that everyone involved is in a state of mind to make projects a success that goes well beyond just IT, but all stakeholders.
Cost Reduction and Streamlining Operations
On a corporate level, we are investing a lot of time in modernizing the data environment and therefore creating more flexibility to automate tasks and accessing data. Giving our team the ability to easily report on, access and distribute data across the enterprise brings huge efficiencies to remove processes that were manual before or tedious to access.
Partnering for Success
We have several partners that have helped us achieve a better enterprise platform in general. Microsoft, IBM and Oracle are key players in the platform.
The Data-Driven Enterprise
Data and management of data is the baseline key to any modern enterprise. You must have good data, and then you have to have that data in a system that allows for an architecture of easy self-service analytics, that allows for future expansion and change. All of that together allows you to layer on newer or emerging technologies as they come up.
Leading Teams in Technological Innovation
We work with all brands and most tech stacks within the hotels themselves. From a corporate perspective, we are on par with any other enterprise. The biggest item I try to do is have the team focus on what is important and rely on established metrics to work hand in hand with our partners, trying to avoid “firefighting” and focus on solutions that can help manage situations better. Technology plays a role in this by moving away from manual management and focusing on technology and data to deliver metrics and information.
Advice for Leaders
Having buy-in on the C-level on where you need to go and executing a plan toward that. The business must want to move forward in whatever direction is being proposed. Without that support any project can easily be dead in the water.
