wagnerblog.com

This week I have been working with NxTV, the premier supplier of in room entertainment for hotels. The product sold by NxTV is essentially a small computer that is attached to the hotel tv set. Customers can order movies or internet access on it. The set top box talks to a couple of servers and movies are streamed to the TV. Of course its more complicated than that, but in a nutshell thats the business.

I am working on an implementation of an open standard for the hospitality industry. One thing really caught my attention at this company - the all pervading sense of quality that drives the organization. From schematics to manuals to pretty rigorous QA testing, you can tell here is a business that really wants to succeed by providing a superior service. I mentioned this observation to one of the VP’s . He chuckled and said ” When you have 5 star hotels as customers, you need to be a 5 star vendor”

That actually made a lot of sense to me. One of the reasons there is so much crappy software floating around - especially in the companies working in web applications - is the fact that a lot of this software is ordered by business units instead of IT departments. And so many business units in corporate America have no clue what quality software is. Its not their core competency so I dont blame them. That’s not to say that they wouldn’t like a working product. Of course they would. But it has been my experience that projects which are ordered and managed by business units directly, tend to go astray more than those run by IT. As a matter of fact I know one development outfit where the prospect of rigorous oversight would instill a great deal of concern because this company almost runs all projects on the notion that they can thoroughly befuddle their customers with technical details, which then gives them more time on the project and occasionally makes them look like a hero to the unsuspecting business manager. This would never fly with IT involvement.

To prove that every sweeping generalization has an exception, this stands in marked contrast to the way hotels seem to deal with their vendors. Especially luxury hotels. Try and tell the Peninsula in Beverly Hills that their high powered guest can’t do something with your product because ….. [insert typical excuse here]……. Try that and see how long you will be in business with the Peninsula. The VP I spoke with indicated this is the case for most of their high end customers. His company, in a sense, has to be on par with the level of quality that guests are used to. These are guests with private jets, very expensive high quality German cars, who expect to get what they pay for.

So there you have it. I found a quality company in a most unexpected place for the most unexpected reasons. But when you think about it, the company has to operate this way in order to compete in the hospitality industry, which at this level of service has some very high demands and expectations. Which in turn drives the product quality. Neat.