Research Paper on:
Hotel and IS Applications

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
IT function formerly was the "poor relation" of the corporate world, responsible for reporting and recording past events and business results, but taking no part in current business function.  It certainly filled no strategic role, but that situation has changed dramatically over the past decade. Some of the current issues in IT include globalization of the IT function  and guarding against spending too much on IT systems in order to gain little benefit for the additional costs. The purpose here is to assess the benefits a hotel  can expect to gain from automating its office and reservations systems. General Considerations Broadening Reach  One of the facts of corporate life in todays business environment is that of globalization of business. Even if the hotel has no plans of "going global," chances are  great that it will have international contacts, correspondence and financial transactions. Of course increasing numbers of organizations are expanding to include international presence, and those operating outside the home  country need to maintain constant contact between headquarters and the remote site, as well as between remote sites. The information that various sites add to daily records combine to  give accurate real-time views of current business results, which can be invaluable in todays hypercompetitive and fast-paced business environment. In the hospitality environment, this situation can apply in terms  of increasing opportunities with travel agents and those individuals making their own travel and accommodation arrangements. Hackney (2002) notes this emergence of the  IT function out of the recesses of the "number crunching" operations to "the centre of critical organisational change" (p. 3). The author notes that "There is an increasing dependency