CIO Roundtable: Betting on digital transformation? How to bridge the IT gap in Gaming and Hospitality

It’s time for IT to play its hand in digital

After mastering re-openings post pandemic, the time is right for IT leaders to get back into the driver’s seat. In the Gaming and Hospitality industry, CIOs and their departments are no longer seen as cost centers and business support functions. They are becoming a revenue-generating, high-performing business function, elevating their position across the entire organization. But many CIOs are posing the question of how to actually build this position (rather than talking about it) and deliver against it.

Strengthen IT’s ability to enable digital value

• The gaming and hospitality industry has been focused on keeping the lights on. But it must now be agile to support shifting customer needs.
• IT organizations can do a lot more when it comes to digitally enabled business and IT capabilities.
• IT needs to be able to innovate, support exceptional online and on-property experiences, provide insight-creating data tools, and keep operations secure – in short, be a true digital partner.

Close the gap to digitally transform and innovate

Hear directly from leading experts in the field:

• Understand how IT can gain digital ownership to enable digital transformation.
• Learn how to determine IT’s capability to digitally transform the business.
• Explore how to break down digital to devise improvement initiatives.

Your Challenge

• Digital is the new normal. COVID-19 was the volatile breaking point that forced change in the industry on an IT, business, and customer level.
• The industry deals with a high level of digital threats, disruptions, and new entrants within the space. Organizations must determine how they will sustain and differentiate themselves in this competitive environment.
• There is an accelerated pace and direction for digital transformation. Organizations are now trying to understand its implication on their own businesses: What are the opportunities? What are the risks? Where does focus need to be placed?

Common Obstacles

• The gaming and hospitality industry is focused on keeping the lights on. The industry must be agile to support the business to suit shifting customer preferences and expectations. To do this, IT needs to be “digital”; able to innovate, support exceptional online and on-property experiences, provide insight-creating data tools, and keep the operations secure – especially in a highly regulated environment.
• Unfortunately, IT organizations fall short when it comes to digitally enabled or transformed business and IT capabilities.
• The industry has the perception of being infrastructure-heavy. Organizations will need to push past “keep the lights on” operations to digitally transform and innovate the business.

Info-Tech's Approach

• Use Info-Tech’s data-driven IT diagnostics as a baseline to determine IT’s capability to digitally transform the business.
• Break down digital into five growth categories to devise improvement initiatives: Digital Strategy, New Customer Frontiers, Continuous Innovation, Workforce of the Future, and Resilient Operations.
• Analyze from the three perspectives to see where your IT department stands:
  • Do you have support from your business users to transform their departments?
  • Do you have the mandate from executives to innovate?
  • Can IT execute digital?

Info-Tech Overarching Insight

"Based on the results, gaming and hospitality IT departments are in an unsupportable position to bridge the digital transformation gap. IT must gain total digital ownership by educating the business departments to transform, improving the business executive perception of IT to innovate, and evaluating pressing processes to enable."

Four disruptions driving digital transformation in the gaming industry

The addition of online products

• iGaming has become a lucrative product, earning $3.71 billion among 6 states alone (American Gaming Association, 2022).
• Online sports betting has expanded drastically in North America since the pandemic with 87% of states gaining legislative approval after 2019.

The acceleration of platform provision

Platform provision consists of:

• Being asset light: Operators leverage REITs to unload assets and focus on the brand. For example, GLPI owns 35 Penn Entertainment properties.
• Digital acquisitions and spin-outs: Operators look to acquire digital assets and/or build digital units to focus and succeed in the online market. For example, in 2015, PENN Entertainment formed its digital entity, Penn Interactive Ventures.

The budding future of web 3.0

• Crypto and NFTs are becoming value creators for all industries. Experts predict crypto gambling will reach a value of $93 million by the end of 2023 (Yahoo, 2022).
• The potential for casino involvement in the metaverse is staggering. Decentral Games’ ICE Poker Virtual Casino has made over $7.5 million from November 2021 to February 2022 (Business Insider, 2022).

The frictionless and convenient world

Mobile app strategies are converging with contactless and digital strategies to provide a seamless and easily accessible customer experience.

• Omnichannel: Grosvenor Casino experienced a 12% increase in revenue from omnichannel efforts (Rank Group PLC, 2021).
• Hyper-personalization: 90% of customers find personalized advertising appealing (Deloitte, 2020).