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“YOU DO GET THE SENSE THAT WE’VE EMERGED FROM THE DARK AGES”
employees, and customers. “It’s certain- ly a part of our sports, and it’s part of our company,” says Brian Barth, executive director of finance and accounting at Sun Valley, Idaho, where Union Pacific Rail- road built the world’s first single chairlift in 1936. “We’ve been around a long time, there’s a lot of tenure, and lots of history.” When Sun Valley’s parent company, which also owns six hotels and Snowba- sin in Utah, underwent a merger, many of the resort’s business software systems changed. Barth and his teams saw an opportunity to overhaul other systems, too. “There are very few systems that we haven’t touched or upgraded in the past three to four years,” he says. In so doing, he understood that there could be some aversion to change. “A big area of focus for us was to work on how we effectively laid out and managed this change,” says Barth. The resistance is melting. Despite the industry’s inertia, it has played some quick catch-up. Kerr notes that it wasn’t
long ago when most things were done on paper. “You do get the sense that we’ve emerged from the dark ages,” he says. Also, part of the equation is that busi- nesses across every industry have adopt- ed tech components—whether you are ordering a pizza on a Friday night, enrolling in a quilting class, or getting the daily news. “Now, e-commerce is no different than any other commerce,” says McNulty. “Brick and mortar has adopted e-commerce, and vice versa.”
bert Mazenod, which caused a variety of issues, including overtaxing an I.T. team that seemed to often be involved in fix- ing problems that arose with the older, customized systems. Planning is imperative. Lake Lou- ise gathered people from every depart- ment to identify needs, problems, and solutions. “It was important that every stakeholder be involved,” Mazenod says. “We wanted to make an assessment of our needs and then explore every system available in the industry.” The process took his team a few years. Mazenod says the group’s goals included improving operational effi- ciency, making the job easier and more intuitive for staff, and improving the cus- tomer experience. Barth’s team at Sun Valley established an I.T. steering committee comprised of various stakeholders. They built a formal process to evaluate the resort’s technolo- gy, whereby a department would observe a problem area or need, and the commit-
PREPARING FOR AN UPGRADE
Every resort operation I spoke with con- vened a work group to identify needs and problem areas before investing in tech- nology systems. That’s an important first step for any ski area. Five years ago, every revenue cen- ter at Lake Louise Ski Resort in Alberta was operating on separate, outdated, custom-built software. “There was no integration,” says Lake Louise CFO Nor-
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