to our customers and enabling them to interact online with our systems.

Security is an issue; hacking is an issue. We're constantly looking at ways to protect our systems, to enhance the availability, stability and security…these are the fundamental things we need to make sure we're good in, before we even think about adding new capabilities to the system.

Mobility is another area we are looking at. With Hong Kong's very mature wireless infrastructure, which has 3G and Wi-Fi capabilities, our customers are getting more and more interested in accessing or placing bets through wireless devices as well as through the Internet. We want to continuously look at ways to make it convenient for them to do so anytime, anywhere, with good response time and the right level of security, and on any device.

Interactive services is another area we're continuously exploring for different technologies, both on the Web as well as mobile devices. Our interactive transactions have gone up in a big way over the last few years. Just last year alone, our interactive transactions over the Web have gone up by 65 percent. We're seeing that the e-society is actually working for our business, in particular, where people are seeing--almost like e-banking and related type of services--the Internet and mobile phone or devices as a very convenient and appropriate way of doing business or conducting transactions.

We're also looking at a better way of managing our information--we're getting deeper and deeper into business intelligence and data warehousing. In order to serve our customers better, we have to understand them better and we can do so through our daily interaction with them.

What's hot on your agenda these days?
We're looking at extending our enterprise… We're in the process of looking at opportunities outside Hong Kong, where we may be able to export our racing business and cooperate with other countries.

There's also a clubhouse that we're building in Beijing--a very premium club serving people from Hong Kong who travel frequently to Beijing, as well as locals who are interested to join. That requires extending our enterprise, our IT systems to various places, introducing the platforms that we have for these diversified businesses as well as ensure that there's an appropriate level of integration and information management.

We're also introducing a racing club, which is a new membership for people interested only in horses. That opens up the opportunity to leverage on our current capabilities in membership management and CRM (customer relationship management), to support that new business.

As part of these plans, we're going to introduce very personalized customer service using either biometrics or RFID tagging technology. This will enable us to recognize our members when they come in, so that we will already have all the things they need lined up for them before they even arrive at the club.

We're currently using RFID quite extensively, and we're getting into biometrics. We're thinking of trying out a few things--palm reading, facial recognition and pattern recognition. For example, we're launching a car-parking system very soon that reads the plates of cars so we'll know whether to admit these vehicles.

How has RFID helped your business?
We actually have a system in place to tag the horses and track their location when they're in a race, so we can monitor the timing, speed and performance as well as the location.

We're in the process of implementing this project. The initial phase went live in end-2003. The system is now able to show on a real-time basis, the sequence of horses as well as the sectional timing--that is, how long each horse takes to finish each section of the race. This provides very insightful data for people to analyze the performance of horses so they can try to bet more 'intelligently'.

In future, we're going to use those location and performance data to put in place multimedia information for our customers who come to the race and also to put on the Web.

With such a large IT team at the Club, are most IT projects done in-house?
Today, more work is done in-house but we're actually moving toward outsourcing, especially for some systems that are what we call betting related. For systems that require specific skills, it may be difficult for us to outsource and we have people who are very knowledgeable in these areas. For other systems such as HR, finance, business intelligence, we find that either co-sourcing or outsourcing would be a good way to do it. So we are moving toward that direction.

While we hope to do that, we're also seeing the importance of continuing to strengthen our project management capabilities. Over the last couple of years, we've put in a lot of professional, comprehensive and robust project management governance in place so that we're able to keep everything under control, especially projects that have been outsourced.

We've tightened up a whole lot of methodology; we're continuously strengthening our IT architecture capability and process. All these things will better position ourselves in the future so that we are able to enjoy a more flexible resource pool, combining internal expertise with external capabilities.

 Previous 1 2 

	Back to CIO Vision Series

Post your message here