The Analytic Hospitality Executive

CHAPTER 2Data Management for Hospitality and Gaming

Before we can get big data, we need small data, and before small data, we need clean data.

—Tarandeep Singh, Senior Director, RevenuePerformance & Analytics, Asia, MiddleEast & Africa, IHG

You can’t have analytics without good data. We all know this. So, I will start with the data. I will be honest, I used to think that data management was about as unsexy as you could get. It was always the boring stuff you had to address before you could get to the good stuff, the analysis. My opinion has dramatically changed over the past few years. In fact, I’ve come to realize that an organization’s data is probably the second most important asset it has, after people, and, yes, I mean more important than the properties you own, or the brands in your portfolio. Therefore, your data management strategy is crucial to your long-term success. And, it turns out, data management is actually a pretty interesting strategic problem. The decisions you make about how to define, access, store, and surface your data are as important as the analytic techniques you deploy and the reports you create from them. In fact, these decisions determine whether your analytic programs will ultimately be a success or a failure.

In this chapter I talk about data management for hospitality and gaming. Many organizations are so eager to get to the analytics that they forget about establishing a sound and sustainable data management strategy. My goal is to help non-IT personas ...