1. Key problems
The key problem is Hilton Hotel does not offer approaches to assess the benefits from their IT project by considering their cost of investment. In other words, how can Hilton assess the value of the OnQ project in contest of how much it’s costing them to develop and implement the solution for all of its hotels? Moreover, is there any priorities can be set by company investing in different projects instead of OnQ?
2. In-depth analysis
a. The root causes are organizational. The company focus too much on expanding their brand through franchising by using OnQ project, but overlook to approach or develop a way to precisely assess the benefit from the IT investment. Or they may think it is not necessary to review a successful project. Hilton roughly attributed the benefit and the successful expanding to the OnQ project basing on inadequate evidence.
b. There are three major stakeholders, which are Hilton, franchisee, staff and customers. If the Hilton overstated the profit that OnQ project generating, it may cause unrecognized lose from the IT project. As a result, the value of the Hilton brand will decrease, and the potential franchisee may unwilling pay for the OnQ project. Both the staffs and customers are benefited from the OnQ project since staffs can use the project to communicate with customers more efficiency, and customers always gain more or less benefit from CRM.
c. 1) Using John Ward six steps of approach to identify the benefit from the specific IT project. In this way, the company would be able to assess the benefit step by step and provide a very clear benefit structure for the stakeholders.
2) outsourcing their IT project. d. I highly recommend Ward six steps. The assessing methods would be able to make management to clearly understand the benefits they are going to take from the IT investment and therefore the company know the amount that they are willing to invest. Though the