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The Next Leg
Even with all MasterCorp's IT progress of late, CEO Grindstaff wants to continue on the journey and make smarter IT decisions. And so he sends Loveday, Swafford and others to executive events to learn more. That's where the idea to form an IT steering committee to prioritize and manage projects came from. Because so much of the company rides on Web App, the committee decided to focus first on the application -- specifically, its uptime and plans for business continuity.
Loveday estimates Web App is available 98% to 99% of the time. When the system does go dark, employees must resort to the paper-based way of scheduling and payroll processing, which doesn't sit well with Goff. "We've become so reliant upon this technology that when you have to do it by pen and pad, it gets tough," Goff says.
The committee weighed two options: either giving Web App to a hosting provider that had the expertise and resources to quickly take over the application and ensure its availability (with the provider as the primary host) or building a redundant data center at one of its 70 resort locations.
The latter choice would cost $150,000 and stress out the IT department of six people who would be responsible for managing it. "We would have had to add more staff, construction costs, security," says Loveday. And so MasterCorp struck a deal for outsourcer Rackspace Ltd. to become the primary hoster for Web App and the backup site for Great Plains. MasterCorp wanted to keep its financials close to the vest and the application running in its own data center.
Despite the merits of this plan, the hand-off ran into problems, mostly because of MasterCorp's less-than-state-of-the-art data center. "We never went through and made all our operating systems the same," says Loveday, adding that the data center has iterations of NT 4.0, Windows 2000 and Windows 2003. But a third party uses only one. Also, Web App's and Great Plains' databases ran on separate machines yet still accessed each other. They needed to be integrated more tightly before a third party could host them.
The thinking went, says Swafford, "Let's spend some money and update some of our equipment and redesign the way some of our databases work, and then outsource the disaster recovery piece." Loveday has led this effort, with plans to reconfigure the applications across four servers instead of two and combine the Great Plains and Web App databases onto a single server. He hopes to finish by January 2007, he says.
One project that's not going so quickly is Loveday's ongoing initiative to integrate Web App with his customers' systems. Doing so would mean the resorts could send their unit status information automatically every morning and the executive housekeeper wouldn't have to input the data. Loveday is looking at everything from ActiveX to FTP to XML to solve the integration issues. But it's a challenge, he says, because many resorts have IT bureaucracies that slow down or bring to a standstill any negotiations having to do with business partner integration projects.
Despite this tough leg of the high-tech journey, technology has come a long way at MasterCorp -- even if the company still uses that same $300 cable modem. Just how far? CFO Swafford sums it up best: "If somebody came in and said, 'Hey, we're going to buy MasterCorp,' what they'd be paying for is our IT systems," he says. "That's what makes us different, what makes everything work."
Tom Kaneshige was a senior features editor at CIO Decisions. To comment on this story, email editor@ciodecisions.com.
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