An inside job
An inside job
Oracle's Larry Marchman shares his views on the importance and potential of the corporate Intranet for gaming companies
Intranets are not a new concept.
Businesses with large numbers of employees, such as financial service institutions, health care organizations, retail operations and, yes, even the casino industry, have relied on this technology for years, using it primarily to foster, facilitate and better manage inter-company communications. All this is well and good, but the experts who have developed the systems that make Intranets possible are quick to point out that most companies only scratch the surface of the technology's potential, especially when it come to worker training and compliance issues, and improving customer service.
Indeed, how gaming companies can get more from their corporate Intranets, and thereby justify the cost of installing and upgrading the technology, is the subject of a session taking place at the Gaming Technology Summit, an Ascend Media and WhiteSand Consulting seminar and trade show event taking place later this month at the Green Valley Ranch in Las Vegas. The person in charge of leading this discussion: Larry Marchman, an applications server specialist at Oracle Corp., based in Redwood Shores, Calif.
The choice of Marchman and Oracle is apt. In the late 1970s, Oracle released of the world's first commercially available relational database management system (RDBMS). Now the world's largest enterprise software company, Oracle today helps governments and businesses around the world become more information driven. Marchman is a senior level IT professional with over 15 years experience in software sales and management, software consulting and software development. He has significant expertise in middleware technologies including application platform suites (APS), portals, business intelligence, integration technologies, business process management, Web services, service oriented architectures, J2EE and other open standards.
Marchman talked with Casino Journal Senior Editor Matt Connor about how corporate Intranets impact employee relations at casino companies.
Have you worked with many casino companies in the development of their corporate Intranets?
Primarily our connection with casino companies is some ISV applications that are built on our technology. We focus on leveraging our portal and technology as a way to deliver HR-type self-serve applications as a secure way to communicate with the employee base through a browser. We have lots of customers that are doing that. But there are a lot of different components that are part of our gaming solution. It's a lot broader than just that.
When you're talking about Intranets for gaming, I can tell you that all the companies have Intranets, because they're all, basically, large IT shops. Everything is networked, right down to the gaming floor.
How can Oracle's technology help casino companies better communicate with their employees and customers through corporate Intranets?
Oracle technology runs on corporate networks. We can take applications and expose them in multiple ways so the company gets the right information at the right time. That can be on an Intranet, meaning only someone inside the company could look at it. Or they could extend it out to their customer base through the Internet.
Basically, there's no difference between the networks. The network is the same. It's just where you put the firewalls. Most of the new technologies that people are marketing in the casinos are going to be able to be employed into the data centers and will be able to work in an Internet or Intranet type environment.
From a human resources standpoint, how can corporate Intranets help streamline the hiring and firing process and employee training?
Human resources is a big issue for the gaming industry, for the casinos, because there's so much activity going on, they don't have the systems to manage the new hires, to get them the documentation they need, all that type stuff. We can automate all that by using a portal. We provide the technology by which a Harrah's or MGM Mirage could build an internal site that an employee could log onto. Then they would get their information delivered to them. Then they'd get notifications that they need to go sign certain documents and provide a link to online training. We can automate all that and provide the whole audit trail around that.
We have a couple of customers who are on this same type of application. One is a major retailer that is rolling out to 25,000 employees a self-serve HR function. Right now they don't have that capability and it's costing them a lot of money to handle things in a manual way. They're going to leverage our technology to put up that internal site which has all the HR functions and the content that is needed, as well as the application to get them signed up, the W-2 and W-4 forms, or if there's any sexual harassment training that needs to be done and all that sort of thing
And all of that activity can be monitored by HR personnel?
Yes, the HR people, the administrators, can go in and find out where people are in the process, so they can take corrective action. The idea is that I can go to any computer with an Internet browser and have access to that application.
Casinos hire so many people, they're rolling out so many new properties, they don't know how to manage it. This is a way for them to leverage technology, through an HR portal, to get the employees the right information they need, to get them through the regulatory hurdles and get them on board.
What are we talking about in terms of time- and cost-savings?
There are numbers that analysts have put together about the type of savings companies can see with this type of application, but the whole notion that employees can do the self-serve human resources function means the company doesn't have to have call center people sitting there doing it. They don't have to print a whole lot of stuff up and mail it.
A lot of companies have a lot of infrastructure set up around that. We basically automate things through the technology, and do it in a secure way. It helps to get new employees up and running much quicker, so you're reducing the cycle time to on-board a new employee. You're reducing the cost around that and you're improving the visibility that led to that process. In gaming, there are probably some regulatory things that need to happen. If I'm a dealer, there are certain regulatory things that come into play, and we can put those into the application so that documents are handled appropriately, people are notified that they need to do certain things.
But if you're not physically presenting the new employee with that kind of regulatory paperwork and if it's all being done on a computer screen, then how can a supervisor be assured that the paperwork is being completed in a timely fashion?
If you were to log into your HR portal and you needed to do some special regulatory things, we would display it to you as an alert. It might say, "Hey, employee, you need to go do this next." If you don't do that after a certain period of time, we can configure the system so that if the employee hasn't completed his task within 48 hours and notified the HR administrator, the HR administrator can make a phone call and ask why that hadn't been done.
What other benefits can a corporate Intranet provide gaming companies?
Most companies that leverage the Intranet use them to share news and content. There will typically be messages from the president and press releases and stuff can be taken off and added, so we can add customization at that level.
How important are portals in the deployment of Intranets?
Portals are one of the key pieces. There are portals for all kinds of stuff. When a new project comes up, they can develop a portal site for collaboration and content about that project. People who are involved in it can log into that and get the information they need and share information. You can take it to a whole other level and talk about Web conferencing and instant messaging. That is all collaboration technology that works in and with that portal infrastructure.
In the browser you can have a discussion thread about the project you're working on. If someone publishes a document, for example, I can look at that document, open up a Web conference to share the document with a bunch of people and then have a discussion about it.
How can a packaged HR system a corporation can purchase-like Oracle's PeopleSoft-work in conjunction with a pre-existing network system?
Let's say a casino customer buys some other packaged solution for HR. They implement that system, but the solution is a combination of that packaged application and the infrastructure that includes that enterprise portal. That way I can push that application to the users from a browser framework in a personalized way. The application infrastructure becomes an enabler.
Is there a way for a corporate Intranet to be of use in customer service?
One of the things that casinos are struggling with now is getting a 360-degree view of their customers. The same infrastructure that helps me deliver that HR portal to 25,000 to 50,000 users is the same infrastructure that can allow me to start delivering information, reports and business intelligence to corporate users. A casino company can then start to see and track their customers more accurately.
Today they already know who the big spenders are on a casino floor. They don't necessarily know about people who may come into the casino, spend a lot of money on food and beverage and retail, but not gamble. Those people aren't tracked as well as the high-rollers. The same infrastructure allows you to deliver business intelligence solutions as well.
