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Just two months into the job, Lee endeavors to utilize capabilities and assets to achieve maximum value for the organization. If there is an ongoing project in one area of the business that could also benefit another part of the business, he will match the interests and necessary resources to carry the project through so both areas stand to gain.
By Lee's estimates, HKJC undertakes an average of about 300 different projects each year, some of which are large projects requiring extensive resources.
The club serves a member base of around 20,000 individuals, most of whom come from well-to-do backgrounds. It also supports over 1 million betting accounts and some 2,000 horse owners.
On a typical horseracing day, more than 5 million transactions are conducted online or over the counter using cash or betting accounts. The club hosts 78 of such races annually. In 2005 alone, it held over 100 lottery draws and accepted football bets on more than 6,100 matches.
HKJC is one of the largest employers under China's special administrative region, with 4,400 full-time and 20,000 part-time staff. Lee, who is also the current president of the Hong Kong Computer Society, leads a team of 360 IT professionals.
Prior to joining the Jockey Club, he spent 10 years at the Hong Kong and China Gas Company (Towngas), where he was a member of the executive committee. He held a number of key positions at Towngas, including group CIO and CEO of two strategic diversification businesses, iCare.com and Towngas Telecommunications Company.
In an interview with ZDNet Asia, Lee describes what it takes to run IT like a business and how he keeps updated on current and upcoming technologies such as RFID (radio frequency identification) and biometrics.
Q: You're no stranger to the IT community. How have your previous roles help prepare you for this one?
A: Running IT is very much like running a business. I was a CIO before where I had a chance to run IT, and when I became a CEO, I found that the better way to run IT is to run it like a business.
| Most of the time when your customers ask for something, they needed it yesterday! |
It doesn't matter whether you're running an IT shop or you're running a non-IT business, you have to be equally customer-oriented; you have to have the same sense of competitiveness such that your internal IT dept has to be almost like a vendor...that you're actually in some ways competing against outside vendors because your users do have a choice--if they don't like you, they can go out and use other people and directly outsource to those companies.
You have to have the same knowledge and awareness of the business to the extent where you need to know it so well, you have the ability to anticipate what's coming down the pipes. Most of the time when your customers ask for something, they needed it yesterday!
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You have to know how to market your IT capabilities, and know what IT can do for your customers. You have to know how to do business process reengineering, and understand your internal and external customer needs. You also have to know how to strike a win-win partnership, not only with your internal users, but also with your suppliers and vendors.
If you adopt the same principles of running a company and use them to run IT, a lot of these things are relevant. What I'm trying to do now is sell these ideas to my staff, to let them understand they need to think like a vendor and that they need to be as responsive, as business-hungry and as market-driven as a vendor. At the same time they need to have a good feel of the business, to the extent that they are able to anticipate what it needs. They need to be very much value-driven, understand how to turn IT into value, and how to spend their day so that they'll be returning maximum value to the business.
What are the club's current key focus areas in IT?
We're constantly looking at ways to do things better. Of course the most important part of our IT is having non-stop, 'bulletproof' and always-on [systems]. If the system goes down you will see us in the news, and we won't like that. Making sure the systems are stable and reliable is very important, but it's also an uphill battle because our environment is getting more and more complex every day. This is partly because we're making data more accessible
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