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| Continuous improvement in the overall IT governance and best practices |
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| GENERAL OPERATIONAL OVERVIEW |
The past year has been one of ongoing focus on the
consolidation of the maturity of the IT operational
environment, coupled with continuous improvement in
the overall IT governance and best practices, as well as
a focus on large scale group projects.
The careful management of change to the IT infrastructure
across the group has also been a contributing factor to
the improved stability of systems. Currently there are few
unauthorised changes, due to the wide adoption of the
managed changed process via the IT
Change Board.
The group has during the past year increased its efforts in
respect of human capital development, including refining
the current recruitment process, enhancing the induction
programs and personalised career development plans, as
well as focusing on the ongoing training (and appraisal) of
IT engineering staff and management. Considering the
group's unique IT skills requirements and the 24/7 working
environment, coupled with the ongoing growth of the
business, recruiting and retaining good staff are
challenging within the context of a dramatic shortage of
IT skills in South Africa.
Key performance statistics for the past year are as follows: |
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Overall availability of IT services: 99,84% (99,76%) |
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Percentage adherence to service level agreements:
98% (95%) |
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Average time taken to restore significant customer
facing outages: 42 minutes
(60 minutes) |
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User satisfaction with IT services: 82,4% (80,5%). |
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| STRATEGIC DIRECTION |
The past few years have been focused on ensuring the
group delivers its IT services within the context of global
best practice and within a transparent and efficient
manner. We will ensure that the IT services within the
group follows the 'continuous improvement' ethos on an
annual basis in order to remain current and relevant to
our customers.
The major focus and strategy going forward will be to
create a future proof and agile information centric
technology platform that easily supports the new business
requirements. The development of this platform will
mainly be driven out by means of strategic projects,
particularly within the customer management arena. The
establishment of the customer as a strategic group asset
requires that the information related to the customer flows freely across the enterprise. The two areas particularly
relevant to this goal are to be found within the information
and integration architecture domains. |
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| Information architecture |
| While the group focused on the harvesting of value from
its key transactional and customer applications (an
application centric approach) in the past, there has not
been sufficient emphasis on the management of quality
data across the enterprise and the translation of this data
into valuable information, particularly in respect of our
customers. The focus has therefore turned to supporting
business with new information architecture inclusive of
strategies and processes (information centric) to create
operational agility. This architectural approach supports
the development of services in accordance with service
orientated architecture principles. In addition, a great deal
of focus is being applied to customer data integration,
as a component of master data management. This will
ensure that the best quality customer information
delivered to business at all key customer interaction points
so as to be able to improve the overall customer service
offering and experience. |
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| Enterprise data integration |
A second strategic initiative is to replace all existing (starting
with customer applications) system interfaces with a new
data messaging system across all properties. The ability to
draw the relevant customer information from many
disparate systems across the group is a complex task, which
will be facilitated by a new enterprise application to be
known as the enterprise messaging system (EMS). This
middleware integration layer forms part of the larger
services orientated architecture initiative mentioned above,
which is currently underway.
The group's application integration needs grew as has its
data integration requirements. We are at a point where we
require a better way to integrate many diverse applications
across the group and have thus looked to EMS. The group
aims to improve consistency in business processes across the
group's many properties and customer touch points, which
to date has been difficult to achieve. |
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| REVIEW OF MAJOR GROUP PROJECTS |
| The key projects reported on in the 2006 report are
progressing well, with some having been completed and
others still in progress. These include: |
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| Microsoft Active Directory Services (AD) |
The migration to AD will be completed by December
2007. This initiative is aligned with the new Microsoft
Enterprise Licensing agreement signed in June 2007. This
new agreement will add further value to the group's
strategic decision to use Microsoft for the core operating
systems and related technology.
In addition, the proposed implementation of Microsoft's
operational management toolkit (Systems Centre Operations
Manager & Configuration Manager) will greatly enhance the
group's ability to manage its distributed server and desktop
environments, which in turn will ensure the correct security
is applied, as well as facilitate a predictable and sustainable
cost of ownership. |
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| Group connectivity (Wide Area Network) |
This new outsourced service has been fully implemented
with great success – the group now enjoys twice the
existing bandwidth (with full redundancy) at less than the
previous
operating cost. |
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| OPERA hospitality systems |
| This major project is proceeding according to the approved
program, albeit with some settling in challenges. The new
central reservations system went live on 16 October 2006,
with the respective property systems following sequentially
thereafter. The largest property installation, Sun City,
is complete, with the balance of the group wide
implementation scheduled for completion by March 2008.
This is a little later than originally envisaged, due mainly
to the complexity of the various new systems being
implemented. The project is still within the forecast cost of
R22 million. |
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| Relationship marketing |
The relationship marketing project (one of the projects
to enable the customer management strategy and focus
of the group) is progressing well and will provide the group
with technology which will be able to display a 'single view'
of our customers. The solution also includes a campaign
management tool, which will enhance our current
marketing capability.
These two new business applications (single view of the
customer and campaign management) will draw their
information from a new single image customer database
(SICD). The SICD will act as a repository for key customer
information sourced from many disparate databases and
systems currently spread across the group, utilising the
new enterprise data messaging system discussed previously. |
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| Contact centre |
A second major technology enabling project under the
customer management program is the enhancement of the
group's contact centre. The intention is to create a 'single
point of contact' for our customers, offering the effective
facilitation of customer interactions and service requests,
across various communication channels. It will also aim to
support and enable the properties with value added services,
for example outbound data cleaning capabilities.
This project will span a period of approximately three
years, with the first phase seeking to enhance and
leverage the existing call centre platform. The foundation
and functionality created through the single view of the customer desktop application and the SICD will be
leveraged in the future contact centre. |
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| Casino Management System |
| Group wide MVG functionality project |
| The goal of this project was to enable the group's MVG
cardholders to seamlessly transact (using their smart card)
at any Sun International casino. They can now use the
cash purse and MVG point balances anywhere, regardless
of where the cash was originally loaded onto the card, or
where the points were earned. The final phase of the
project was completed in April 2007, at an overall cost
of R7 million. The results to date are most gratifying
with 68% of 'foreign casino' MVG card transactions,
representing some 28 000 transactions, now performed
automatically at the slot machines and not the cash desk
as was previously the case. |
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| New casino management system to replace the
current CMS |
| We reported last year that good progress had been made
with the requirements definition for a new system which
would replace the group's ageing proprietary system, CMS.
Currently, CMS still embodies some of the best features in
any casino software solution available globally. We also
noted last year that a system functionality gap analysis had
commenced with the preferred vendor. We have since been
notified by this vendor that they are not in a position to
provide us with the required new functionality within the
2010 timeframe set by the group. Therefore, we are in the
process of reassessing the various options available to us,
including ongoing engagement with preferred vendors. It is,
however, likely that we will need to extend the December
2010 replacement timeline to a later date. In the interim,
CMS continues to deliver substantial value to the group's
gaming operations and a programme of work is underway
to extend its longevity. |
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