In case you missed it, check out the theory behind the Alpha Games in our last post, Inspired Focused Innovation for Hospitality Technology Solutions.
At SkyTouch, all three departments live in one building: sales, business, and development. Proximity to multiple departments allows for all sorts of benefits when it comes to development, and not just in the ability to have questions answered, deadlines met, and projects adapted. There is also a benefit to having multiple perspectives focused on solving a common problem.
“It’s a cross-functional, collaborative effort where the business stakeholders partner with the technical counterparts to build something better than what each of them could do on their own,” explains Senior Director of IT Larry Gorman. “They all have different experiences, different backgrounds, a different perspective they can bring to the problem.” The benefits of this interdisciplinary problem solving system are increased creative thinking in a professional environment, shared learning across departments that improves all employees’ knowledge bases, and the production of innovative and effective business and technical solutions.
“We’ve seen a business person ask for something, and the technical people behind implementing it will come up with something even better, because they know what’s possible with the technology we’re working with,” Larry says. “And sometimes our technical people may get too linear in their thinking, and they need some creative people who may not be technical to help spur some of that out of the box thinking.”
To harness its collaborative problem solving, twice a year SkyTouch hosts a day of team challenges meant to spur innovative ideas and processes called the Alpha Games. More than just a day of fun, everyone’s projects and progress are presented at the end of the day and voted on. The winning ideas will see development throughout the year.
“The best thing about SkyTouch, I would say, is if you find something really nice, something cutting edge, you can work on it,” says SkyTouch developer Arunesh Gupta. “Usually a lot of companies, they don’t want to invest in new technologies, but not SkyTouch. They invest a lot of money trying to acquire something new.” For example, Arunesh explains an idea for an application that could revolutionize customer check-in and point of sale, which has been in development for some time without immediate payoff.
“To take that risk, it’s a big risk,” he says.
When the SkyTouch developers get the application to work, it will have a huge impact for hotels. That’s why Arunesh and his team, including fellow developer Vijay Deshmukh and Scrum master Billy Whala, used the most recent Alpha Games to explore the application in a new, creative way that tries to explode the barriers they’ve been seeing. Rather than work on the application itself, they’re playing with where to use it.
“Right now we’re using Verifone. That device does not have the best processing power, so we’re trying to use a tablet,” he says. “Verifone doesn’t have what we need. It has some things, like securities built-in, but really what we want to do is Internet-based stuff. We want to create the same things on a tablet.” The Alpha Games give Arunesh and his team a full day to experiment with this new strategy.
“Anything, anything, anything,” Arunesh emphasizes. “If you think the existing way we do things is not the best way, you can propose a new way.” That’s why it’s not just technical solutions being thought up through the Alpha Games.
Look out for our next post, Developing Focused Innovation: The Alpha Games, Part 2 , to learn how SkyTouch is innovating business beyond technology.
