Marriott gets a new Tech Chief
 

Marriott hired the CIO from Merck CIO, I'm ever hopeful this is hopefully the start of fixing some of the simplest things that seem not to be fixed, well at least I can hope, LOL

Sorry if this is old news, but I'm excited at least for a brief second of hope.

Unfortunately they need much more than one new Chief! I could name one more off the top of my head.

I'm curious how much of their IT work they outsource?

Unless they see home brewed IT capabilities as a significant strategic advantage, which is highly unlikely, then I would presume that the vast majority is in the scope of contractors and consultants.

It's very sad because the kind of difficulties Marriott faces are very well-defined and well-understood as generalized versions of them come up everywhere in software. While I've never worked on creating a hotel reservation and inventory management system before, I have worked on analogous projects of much greater complexity and flexibility than what Marriott needs to support, and I believe that a relatively small team of skilled engineers could build a much more reliable and flexible replacement for MARSHA in under two years along with a process to migrate the information for the existing system. Whoever Marriott contracts for their IT is honestly very inept.

For example, I have been involved with data migration efforts before and the way they handled "merging" of SPG and Marriott accounts was one of the most hilariously broken, untested, and poorly conceived processes I've seen of that sort. Try reconciling many sources of media with varying levels of inconsistency in their metadata, and matching things appropriately between a user's own tracks, store tracks, streaming, etc into a unified cloud library. That's a level of complexity way beyond the merging of the Marriott and SPG accounts which both are very well-defined in what information they will have and how it's structured.

When companies like Marriott truly realize the potential value of leveraging data about their customers to offer personalization in a way that gets them to spend more money, they're going to regret not having technology as a core competency. I feel like some banking institutions in the world are already feeling the pain of this, whether it be because of outsourcing or just outright lack of investment.

Yeah, I think that MR's strategy was an old-school market share play predicated upon footprint and leveraging a lot of captive customers (e.g. SPG die-hards), with tech considered to be a back-office afterthought. Not exactly 21st-century stuff, unfortunately. The question, of course, is where an impetus for change will come from - as with many sectors, consolidation has given consumers few places to run to. The move upon which this thread was started hints that they may, for one reason or another, be starting to feel some heat.

Call me cynical, but I have no confidence that a new tech chief will impact the piss poor IT functionality or their strategy of outsourcing everything and going live with minimal/zero testing and seeing what happens.

My company was responsible for the data conversion and migration. Sorry for anyone who lost anything or had to call in to get something fixed!

And no, I did not work on that project or know anyone directly involved