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An Educated Bet
At Harrah's Entertainment, Tracy Austin made her mark delivering IT solutions to support the company's heralded strategic business initiatives. A recognized pioneer in the field of customer loyalty, Austin took on a new challenge in 2003, becoming the first Chief Information Officer at Mandalay Resort Group. Inheriting an existing organization with few formal processes and scant business visibility, Austin had to deliver quickly. Here's how she played her hand.
The first time I saw Tracy Austin, she was seated with a group of experts at an IT conference. The panelists, heavy-hitters all, leaned into their microphones and variously addressed a packed hall on the topic of enterprise data warehousing. Austin, at the time an IT executive who had shepherded the acclaimed Total Rewards program at Harrah's Entertainment, was last to speak. The moderator asked how information had helped Harrah's improve its relationships with its customers. Addressing the crowd, Austin replied, "At Harrah's we've learned a lot about our customers, including the fact that they're promiscuous." With the audience now in rapt attention, she continued: "They go to other casinos."
The conference attendees were refreshed as much as they were entertained. Here was an irreverent IT manager whose organization - a best-practice leader inside and outside its industry - recognized desirable and not-so-desirable customer behaviors and optimized its marketing accordingly. It was no coincidence that once the panel broke up, Austin was besieged with advice-seekers asking for guidance and her business card.
Flash forward to March, 2003. Austin joins Mandalay Resort Group as the company's first Chief Information Officer, reporting directly to the president. Not only does she have to run IT, she has to define her own position in a company that had traditionally viewed IT as a cost center. The stakes, in every sense of the word, were high.
The Hand You're Dealt
Though it operates in the same industry as Harrah's, Mandalay Resort Group has a different business model. With revenues a little over one-half of Harrah's at the time, MRG had more properties and almost three times as many hotel rooms. While Harrah's emphasized gaming, MRG was a self-described resort. Unlike Harrah's, MRG didn't view IT as a strategic enabler. Indeed, MRG's IT organization hadn't established many formal job roles or development processes. Austin needed a starting point. "The first thing I had to do was stop the bleeding so that people could do their jobs," she says. Austin wanted IT to provide value quickly and create a positive perception among business stakeholders. "The business people didn't really understand that we needed to talk to them," she says. "And we couldn't very well walk through the business with a blank sheet of paper. I wanted to evolve IT from being an order-taker to a business enabler. The only way to do that was to deliver results fast."
Austin and her team defined their own success based on three targets. First was management excellence, through which IT would acquire top talent, instill measurable improvements and individual accountability. A ROI focus would ensure that IT kept cost savings and revenue generation top-of-mind. Being demand driven meant that IT could be flexible in meeting the needs of an ever-evolving business. Each of the targets (see graphic) intersects in practice. For instance, management excellence drives staff retention, which in turn reduces cost. Austin and her team used the targets as a guide for taking on new work efforts and regularly assessing existing ones.
No one from IT had ever proactively engaged business people, let alone presented them with metrics for success. Austin's team began measuring criteria like system availability and downtime, and presenting the results to business stakeholders for feedback. The business started talking. She began engaging her fellow executives by using the company's annual report as a means of building consensus and buy in. She formed an IT Strategy Council, comprised of senior VPs across the business, and engaged them in the formation of an IT Strategic Plan. The resulting feedback led her to establish six strategic initiatives and the projects underneath them. These six initiatives remained constant during Austin's tenure. "They were our touchstone," she says.
Recognizing MRG's evolution away from siloed efforts and toward cross-functional programs, Austin also began filling in missing IT capabilities. IT established a Business Solutions Office - Austin's version of a PMO with an emphasis on business enablement, acquired enabling tools like data quality and profiling, and introduced formal systems development methodologies. A new standardized project sourcing process outlined project approval workflows, and ensured that the new process was socialized with the business.
A difference from her role at Harrah's and IBM before that was that Austin didn't have the advantage the slow, incremental rollout. "At Harrah's we were able to evolve our IT capabilities as the business evolved over time. I didn't have that luxury at MRG. The good news was that I'd led so many large projects at Harrah's that the stress of some of our new MRG programs wasn't that bad. One thing I learned at Harrah's was that the devil is in the details. This helped me accelerate things at MRG."
Figure 1: IT Capability and Culture Targets
The People Stuff
Any organizational change comes with challenges, and as "new kid on the block" at a company with double-digit revenue growth, a less experienced executive could have been rendered inert. Austin knew that measuring systems improvements was a good start, allowing IT to demonstrate tangible improvements, but she needed to do more to cement the perception of IT as solutions providers. This meant unveiling a set of IT functions that would help the business reach its diverse goals. Acquiring new skills became a priority. Austin brought on some qualified deputies, including executive directors to run the IT operational infrastructure, application development and support, and the Business Solutions Office.
Her senior staff hired several business analysts (a new position for MRG), who understood how to gather and document business requirements and leverage those as a springboard for development projects. The analysts became de-facto business relationship builders, regularly interfacing with users and communicating progress. Rigorous analysis allowed IT to put structure around these conversations. Business analysts created requirements for each discrete project, each mapped back to one of Austin's six strategic initiatives. Austin watched as the barriers around IT slowly crumbled. Unlike many new executives who begin flipping their Rolodexes as soon as they move in, Austin didn't draw upon her network of gaming industry contacts. After all, her business constituents weren't just resort managers but executives in finance, marketing, and accounting. She made a point of hiring new staff from outside gaming, insisting on new paradigms and fresh thinking. "I had the domain knowledge already," she explains. "I needed to augment the team with people with new perspectives and different experiences." Austin maintains the keys to executing change across a large, multi-property, multi-product company are the people, and she praises her direct reports and their respective teams for driving IT's success. "It really is all about the team you have," she says. "If I deserve any credit, it's for bringing the right people on board at a time when communication and collaboration were not optional."
The Payoff
Notwithstanding the fuzzy red dice hanging in her office, few of Austin's professional successes are due to luck. Rather, rigor, process, and talent - "the people I surround myself with: my staff and my business partners" - have formed her management philosophy and helped her deliver her vision.
The results have been impressive. IT began a series of projects that delivered efficiencies well into the millions of dollars. The business was participating in realizing these benefits. And in early 2005 MRG IT arrived at the end of an 18-month Sarbanes-Oxley audit - with no findings. Austin was named one of the "Great Women in Gaming," by Casino Enterprise Management, following a nod of the head by Computerworld, which listed her as one of its "Premier 100" IT executives. But the reward Austin seems to relish most is that of team leader. She tells the story of a conversation she recently had with one of her managers. "He'd just delivered an IT project that added a million dollars to the bottom line of Mandalay Bay [MRG's Las Vegas resort]. He told me that this has been the best year of his life. He had the management backing to do his job and do it well, and the processes and tools we've put in place have allowed us to scale-all he had to do was use them. He really believed that as a middle manager, he'd had a hand in shaping business excellence." Austin clearly sees this as a personal success as well as a professional one. "This guy cited other places he's worked and he loved the culture at MRG, one that he had a hand in shaping. It made my day."
The recent acquisition of MRG by MGM/Mirage has offered Austin yet another round of opportunities. She was recently tapped by Fontainebleau, LLC, to develop the customer relationship vision for the company's new resort brand, turning her head yet again toward developing initiatives that help a business achieve breakthroughs. As with MRG, she's poised to act quickly. "While revolution isn't always the answer, both IT and business leaders should be careful about insisting on evolutionary change. You can evolve right into extinction."
Jill Dyche (jilldyche@baseline-consulting.com) is a Partner with Baseline Consulting, a data management and integration services firm. She is the author of two books on the business value of IT. Her third book on Customer Data Integration will be out in 2006.
Jill Dyche is a partner and co-founder of Baseline Consulting (www.baseline-consulting.com), a data integration and business analytics delivery firm. Her first book, e-Data (Addison Wesley, 2000) introduced managers to the concept of enterprise data integration. Her second book, The CRM Handbook (Addison Wesley, 2002) is the CRM best-seller. You can reach her at jilldyche@baseline-consulting.com.
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