Outrigger Hotels and Resorts Strategic Position

1. What is Outrigger Hotels and Resorts’ strategic position? What are it’s strengths and weaknesses? (Use Porter's 5 Forces framework to analyse this.)

2. How well are Outrigger's current IS resources serving its needs?

3. What is the role of information systems at Outrigger- strategic, support, factory, high potential?

4. In your opinion, how should the IS function at Outrigger be organised- partner, platform or for scalability?

5. Based on your answer to the previous two questions, what strategic initiatives would you propose for Outrigger Hotels and Resorts?

The report can be up to 600 words long. For this case, you should refer to the slides and readings from the last few weeks.

Executive Summary

Outrigger’s current strategy is to position its properties in places where people could enjoy a vacation experience leveraging Outrigger’s own core competencies. Within the company’s current strategy, Outrigger’s key assets are having strong brand name and recognition, their relationship with internet travel sites, local knowledge and community ties, and excellent employee relationships.

Currently, Outrigger is being faced with major issues – the main being they do not have a modern, centralized system to integrate all of their properties. Secondary issues include an inability to recognize return, VIP and “special event” guests; a lack of technological amenities for clientele; and a dearth of congruity between retail space technology and the technology of the lodging properties. Of course, all of these issues are key factors in allowing for future growth.

Outrigger can continue business as usual, and suffer the consequences of ignoring technology, or the aforementioned issues can be addressed in, essentially, one of two ways: either attempt to mitigate the problems individually as they become increasingly detrimental to the business, or venture to conquer the obstacles with a comprehensive, multi-pronged plan of attack.

While...