Meghan Walsh - From the Trenches: The Value of Transforming Roles and Technology
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This document summarizes Meg Walsh's presentation on transforming roles and technology at Hilton Worldwide. It discusses Hilton's goal of implementing a single source digital asset management system to enable team members across its 13 brands and 150,000 employees to easily find, store and distribute marketing assets. While IT expertise in DAM systems is not required, visibility of assets should be the default with restriction of access being the exception. The presentation emphasizes being thoughtful, decisive and willing to change when transforming roles and technology.
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Meghan Walsh - From the Trenches: The Value of Transforming Roles and Technology
- 1. From the Trenches The value of transforming roles & technology Meg Walsh Senior Director, Content Strategy @megwalsh05 Hilton Worldwide @HiltonWorldwide November 2016 Hilton West Palm Beach
- 2. © 2016 Hilton Worldwide Confidential and Proprietary @megwalsh05November 2016 We Are Hilton. 13 Brands 104 Countries & Territories 4800+ Properties 150,000 Team Members Waldorf Astoria Park City
- 3. © 2016 Hilton Worldwide Confidential and ProprietaryNovember 2016 Making Decisions @megwalsh05
- 4. © 2016 Hilton Worldwide Confidential and ProprietaryNovember 2016 1 Hilton Garden Inn Key West Are DAM and CM(S) the same thing? @megwalsh05
- 5. No. © 2016 Hilton Worldwide Confidential and ProprietaryNovember 2016 @megwalsh05
- 6. © 2016 Hilton Worldwide Confidential and Proprietary @megwalsh0511/16/2016 Raw Components Publish-Ready
- 7. © 2016 Hilton Worldwide Confidential and ProprietaryNovember 2016 Are these marketing or enterprise assets?2 Conrad Maldives Rangali Island @megwalsh05
- 8. Enterprise. © 2016 Hilton Worldwide Confidential and ProprietaryNovember 2016 @megwalsh05
- 9. © 2016 Hilton Worldwide Confidential and ProprietaryNovember 2016 25 46 1M @megwalsh05
- 10. Project Goal Deliver a single source for enterprise imagery and video management that enables Team Members to find, store, and distribute assets using best in breed technology and efficient, user-friendly processes. noun verb © 2016 Hilton Worldwide Confidential and ProprietaryNovember 2016 @megwalsh05
- 11. © 2016 Hilton Worldwide Confidential and ProprietaryNovember 2016 Does Hilton IT need to be DAM SMEs?3 Embassy Suites Santo Domingo @megwalsh05
- 12. © 2016 Hilton Worldwide Confidential and ProprietaryNovember 2016 No. It’s not secret sauce. @megwalsh05
- 13. © 2016 Hilton Worldwide Confidential and ProprietaryNovember 2016 So What? DoubleTree Resort by Hilton Hotel Xishuangbanna @megwalsh05
- 14. © 2016 Hilton Worldwide Confidential and Proprietary @megwalsh05November 2016 Visibility is the default. Restriction is the exception.
- 15. © 2016 Hilton Worldwide Confidential and ProprietaryNovember 2016 Product IT Content Strategy Product IT Content Strategy @megwalsh05
- 16. © 2016 Hilton Worldwide Confidential and Proprietary @megwalsh05November 2016 Be thoughtful. Be decisive. Be willing to change.
- 17. © 2016 Hilton Worldwide Confidential and ProprietaryNovember 2016 Thank You Waldorf Astoria, Dubai @megwalsh05
Editor's Notes
- Good morning. Disclaimer: nothing revolutionary, just good practice It is possible
- My name is Meg Walsh and I'm the content strategy lead at Hilton Worldwide. We are a global hospitality company of 13 brands, in more than 100 countries. Our content tells many different stories - for Hilton Worldwide as well as each of our more than 4800 hotels. And, we have a lot of people telling our stories - on the web, at conferences, in ads, in sales, through community service and partnerships. In order for us to maximize digital time and space, we need to harness our content - to know what we have, what it can be used for, how to find it, how to distribute it, where it is being used and how well it preforms.
- Understanding your content is a critical part of a digital strategy for any organization. I'd like to talk with you a bit about the work I've been leading for the past year at Hilton and some of the critical decisions we've had to make to ensure we can build and use content effectively across our audiences - guests, team members, and owners. Over the past year we've done a lot of work in the content space - particularly around digital asset management - and I'd like to share 3 decisions that I believe have made the difference in shaping what we are doing, how we are going about it, and how we will work moving forward. To be clear, the decisions we've made won't be the right decisions for all of you. It's not a right or wrong scale, but more of a better or worse for your organization scale. I'd like you to take more from the questions than the options we chose. That being said, here is our story.
- Decision One: Are DAM and CMS the same thing? Note – this is the order we made the decisions, too. You’ll notice the S in parentheses. Most would see this question and assume it is about the technology, and it is, but it is also about the people & process of managing digital assets and content. So, its really a two part question. So, about 14 months ago I joined Hilton Worldwide to create the content strategy practice. There were already conversations underway around the content space, and part of what I needed to do early was determine what conversations we needed to have so that we could move forward. There was a Digital Asset Management project underway, and at that moment a lot of focus was on the DAM product being used to support Hilton.com and whether it could be extended to include more. By end of week one I was waving red flags because we had jumped to a technology decision without having any of the necessary business conversations that would help determine which technology would made sense for us. I am so no one in the audience can relate to that... So, five days in - I recommended we stop the conversation and regroup. All the conversation was around one particular vendor's technology - not about why or what. Technology is the how and we hadn't fully answered the what yet.
- We drew a clear line, and said no, they are the not the same. It’s kind of like saying both HGI and Conrad are hotels but needs they meet are different and how they do it are different. Same for CMS and DAM. Both hold content, but meet different customer needs Now, the wrinkle in our case, was that the DAM product we use for our website and the CMS that we use for our website came from the same product set. So, having a conversation about one without the other was not easy. The DAM question kept getting pulled back to concerns about the CMS, which is the publishing system of both text and assets to Hilton's customer website. It's moments like these that your executive sponsors for a project matter. The only official project at the time was the Digital Asset Management one, but as we were having a product conversation rather than a strategic conversation, the CMS & DAM were becoming more and more the same. The DAM executive sponsor team was in place and they had decision making responsibility for whether combining the CMS and DAM decisions into a single unit made sense. The critical win for us here was the diversity of our executive sponsor team - it wasn't a single organization. Co-sponsors are Global Brand, which includes marketing, and our Architecture, Construction and Design organization. IT and Legal have representation on the group as does our CMO. There was no hesitation in separating CMS and DAM. They could see the links between the two systems, but they also saw the differences between the two, and what they intended the role of the DAM to be in the enterprise. Being able to agree that the purpose of each platform is different opened opportunities to us that were getting lost in the effort to align the needs.
- The distinction we agreed upon is publishable, or publish-ready content versus raw components. Publishable content can be messaging, marketing, offers, descriptions, rates, room descriptions. It can be text combined with creative assets to deliver a total experience. It assists with aggregating of components, possibly from multiple sources with the intent to publish and distribute Components are the photos, videos, final creative, logos, fonts - that when combined with code or text result in experiences. Assets are the raw pieces that can be manipulated and changed based on channel need. We need a place to search, track, and manage the source files so that we can determine how to use them in downstream systems. Its a bit of a nuance but it is an important one and it allowed us to move forward having two connected conversations without forcing needs of one track into dominating the other. We are still having both CMS and DAM conversations. They are not necessarily the same conversations - and they shouldn't be because the questions we need to answer for each are different. Giving ourselves permission to do that has been really meaningful, especially in helping us make decision #2.
- Decision Two: Are these marketing assets or enterprise assets?
- This was an easy question when it came to DAM and is a harder one around CMS, and is, actually, still under review as part of the CMS conversation. For DAM, though, our executive sponsor group was unanimous that DAM is an enterprise need and could not be addressed for a single function or channel. [Marketing vs Enterprise Mike story]
- We have millions of assets dating back nearly 100 years. Knowing what we have and what we can and should use is the challenge. There are a myriad of repositories across the company with no common standards, approach, logging method, tracking, or awareness. We invest millions of dollars a year in asset creation and acquisition and then put them on shared drives or on private ones. We use the same assets over and over and we don’t use ones that could be impactful because so few people know they exist. This is an enterprise problem. Not a department problem. Not a team problem. Not a channel problem. Avg 25 photos per hotel = @ 120K photos online 46 TB archival for ONE BRAND 1M combined assets across non-marketing teams…to date Opening the conversation to an enterprise one, though, also makes things more complicated. Competing needs, different dependencies, desire for control now need to be negotiated across functions, not just within one team. One of the areas we started to see this was in permissions. Teams saying they had assets t they want to load, but only for their team to see and use. I took this to our executive sponsor team and, again, they determined as an enterprise platform, the focus must be on benefiting the enterprise. Visibility of assets is crucial to successful adoption - so we will default to visibility and teams will need to justify restricting access - and old reasons may not be acceptable any more.
- This is our project goal. I describe it as having two parts - the noun and the verb. Our decision to go enterprise demands equal focus on the halves. This isn't just a technology conversation - it is a How Hilton Works conversation. This is where the MarTech conversation gets murky for me. DAM and CMS are both product sets in any MarTech conversation - and they should be - but separating them from enterprise need has to be intentional. Content management and publishing needs are not unique to marketing. The web CMS won't just support marketing. Focusing content technologies on marketing is a limiting decision. We made a conscious choice not to do that for DAM. Assets are multipurpose. Hotel photography is meaningful in marketing, sales, inspiration, industry presentations, publications and so many other outputs. Had we kept the conversation to just marketing, the number of assets we had in play would be smaller and the value we can earn from them would stay limited.
- Decision Three: Does Hilton IT need to be subject matter experts in content technologies? I'm not going to talk about technology selection specifically because that wasn't the most meaningful decision we made in this space. Don't get me wrong, it is an important decision, but there are other people speaking here that are great helps in understanding and optimizing that process. The key decision we made happened prior to starting the RFP for a product, and in fact informed the short list and RFP process we followed.
- Making the decision to focus on enterprise was a big one – it meant this wouldn’t be a quick turnaround. The second critical decision was one I made with my IT partner. Technologies like DAM and CMS often languish in big companies. They are not customer facing, they are working at some level, it costs too much to upgrade, there are other priorities, budget ran out. We’ve all heard the reasons why we aren’t updating, changing, investing. But content’s criticality quotient has changed. Content has always been King, but now its King of the World not just your website. Knowing what you have, being able to aggregate content, being to distribute it efficiently and securely, being able to measure its impact has changed expectations. And, this isn’t just about your external facing website. Its about your app, your intranet, your call center, your email program, your signage, your documentation. So the cortical question before selecting a technology, for me, was is digital asset management technology secret sauce for Hilton? Do I need IT to be SMEs in the technology, how it works, how we can best leverage it? Will Hilton continually invest to keep us at best in breed level as products evolve? My IT partner and I made the decision, together, that, no, Hilton IT did not need to be SMEs in this space. We have other areas that ARE secret sauce and IT should not be distracted by system support for a non-critical TECHNICAL area. It is a critical BUSINESS area. This meant we were going SaaS, which quite honestly, made the selection process for technology streamlined, focused, and productive. To be clear, this didn’t mean IT wasn’t an active participant in the selection or implementation of the system. They are – but their role is different than it would have been had we gone traditional on-prem or private cloud. More on this later. The decision we made is that digital asset management technology is not secret sauce. Having Hilton IT resources knowledgeable in the product we would use and that could focus on keeping Hilton on the leading edge of the tools in the space was not a priority. This is a huge shift from the way most large companies operate. Going on-prem was of no interest to us. My IT partner and I had a frank conversation about technical expertise and what we each wanted FOR the DAM PRACTICE (not just the technology), and what became clear is that putting that burden of expertise and leadership on IT was not in Hilton's best interest. Our IT knowledge and skill need to be focused on capabilities critical to running the hospitality business, not keeping assets stored, managed and tagged.
- So, yeah us. We made some decisions. We picked a DAM product and have a plan of action around CMS. So what? The So What is that in making these decisions we’ve uncovered opportunity and appetite for change in how we work as Team Members not just what product we use and we are having some hard conversations about roles and workflow.
- These three decisions move us from a lift and shift – we’re just going to move things from system to another, with some new metadata but work as we have been to challenging what we ask of teams, what we expect of them, and how we collaborate as an enterprise. We are defaulting to visibility, which is a huge mental shift for teams who are used to controlling every aspect of their asset library.
- In terms of roles, this isn’t about reorgs, it’s about enabling teams to do what they do best, limit repetition, and increase capacity for delivering stellar work. Up until now, product management of content products, content strategy, and IT have done their own thing. Sure, there are conversations when something goes wrong – but there were not enough conversations when things were going right. We are moving to a more integrated and intentional partnership. With the DAM being a SaaS model, IT could easily say it’s on the business to manage that relationship and that product. And to an extent, it is, but I have IT partners who are engaged in the project, having my back in determining what we need, where there may be risk, identifying opportunities to extend use and capabilities in other parts of the organization. The product teams are advocates for the strategic development and use of the DAM and CMS. The idea of “product manager” in this sense is new in the business at Hilton. This can’t be a one and done, we have to nurture, extend, enhance, and improve what the DAM and CMS can deliver for Hilton. Content Strategy is advocating for the content – that we have the right structured vocabulary, that we have meaningful workflows, that there is clear criteria for use and that we can connect use of content across channels. These 3 roles are a unit. No one can make decisions without understanding impact to the other. We’ve eliminated the traditional buffers between teams in order to meet the expectations set by our executive sponsors. What we are seeing are less conflicts, faster resolution of issues, and champions of intent for each other in our organizations. I don’t have to talk to everyone about DAM because I have partners helping me make sure everyone knows. That is liberating.
- I’m quite proud not only of the work we’ve done over the past year, but of the decisions we’ve made and the goals we are setting for the future. We are willing to be different, we are willing to disrupt ourselves in order to be prepared to best support our different audiences. I didn’t talk much about the product we selected for DAM or what CMS we use because at the end of the day they are means to delivering on expectations, they are not the expectation themselves. That realization is better preparing us for delivering best in breed experiences whether digitally or in person on a property. Disrupt yourselves first.