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INFORMATION SYSTEM OF HILTON HOTELS.

INTRODUCTION ABOUT HILTON HOTEL

The most recognized name in the industry, Hilton Hotels stands as the stylish, forward thinking global leader of hospitality. Today Hilton welcomes guests in more countries than any other full-service hotel brand, with more than 530 hotels and resorts in 76 countries across six continents. From inaugural balls and Hollywood award galas to business events and days to remember, Hilton is where the world makes history, closes the deal, toasts special occasions and gets away from it all. 

INFORMATION SYSTEMS & INNOVATION TECHNOLOGIES

Hilton Hotels implements these specific information systems and innovation technologies in order to improve their business operations.

A. Transaction Processing System(TPS):

This information system is tasked to collect and organize operational data of Hilton London Paddington’s activities (1990). For example, a typical banking operation by the hotel involves transferring $500 from the account of their client to the hotel’s checking account. This would seem like a single operation to the hotel, but in reality this transaction consists of two steps: debiting the clients account by $500, and crediting the hotel’s checking account by $500. If the debit operation succeeded and the credit did not, then the $500 would disappear.

The Transaction processing system combines these two operations and groups them into a single transaction. This is done through the production of copies of the data in question, and these copies are then made to run the operations on the copied data. When both commands have successfully completed, the changed data is written back to the system in a single operation. If one of the operations fails, the copied data is simply discarded, and an error is reported.

For many years transaction processing was the domain of information systems, especially since they these information systems were able to guarantee that any changes to the database would be completed. This worked well for most companies, and they could all even run on top of a database with a single client-server.

However, in recent years this model has also become more difficult to maintain. As the number of transactions grew in response to various online services, a single database proved to be very inefficient. Also, most online systems consist of a whole suite of programs operating together, as opposed to a strict client-server model where the single server could handle the transaction processing. Nevertheless, this type of information system will significantly bolster the business operations of hotel establishments when successfully implemented.

B. Management Support Systems:

• Decision Support System(DSS):

This information system goes beyond one-way presentations and sharing of applications to enable a focused exchange of ideas over the Internet or an Intranet. Researches have proved that electronic brainstorming is able to generate more and better ideas (1995). This is brought about by the combination of parallel idea generation and the utilization of focus group discussions and tools for the organization of ideas. Therefore, decision-making is done with a higher degree of consensus and a higher likelihood of implementation success. Meetings within Hilton London Paddington would only take less than a fraction of time as expected. But more importantly, everyone walks away with the minutes of the meeting in hand, regardless of where they are.

Also, because the tools are web-based, the hotel’s management can choose the proper setting for the meetings, whether to place the clients in a conference room, set up a distributed meeting or a mixture of both. The management can decide whether the meeting should be done in real-time or whether the clients can participate and contribute their ideas only when their schedule allows them to. Either way, Hilton London Paddington is assured of getting the same focus and productivity while at the same time having a significantly greater flexibility in terms of scheduling.

•  Executive Information System (EIS):

The Executive Information System begins with the identification of problems. These include the gaps between the desired and actual states that cannot be easily closed easily because of the new knowledge that needs to be produced to support the decisions and actions needed to close them (1992). There are generally three (3) classes of such problems:

·         problems occurring in hotel business processes;

·         problems occurring in hotel knowledge processes; and

·         problems occurring in hotel Knowledge management processes.

Problems occurring in the hotel business processes cannot be resolved through the use of Knowledge management solutions, but through knowledge processing solutions. The other two classes of problems, however, can be solved through the use of Executive Information System services. This Information System will identify, formulate, and evaluate the knowledge processing and knowledge management problems

This is the most important service that the EIS provides for Hilton London Paddington.  Failure to solve a business process problem within the hotel, for instance, may not be caused by a problem in the organization and structure of the hotel’s organizational knowledge processes. Instead, it may be possibly caused by a failure in solving an extremely difficult business process problem, even though available knowledge processes are working just fine.

There are certain instances, however, that it is not always very clear what the nature of the problem is, even if a knowledge processing problem exists. For example, the fact that the knowledge needed to support a particular decision is not there may be possibly caused by the fact that the knowledge exists, but is currently unavailable because of a poorly operating knowledge sharing process. Another possible explanation is that it could be caused by the fact that the process of the development of new knowledge claims is not open to most organizational participants.

The bottom line is the process on how the problem is formulated and diagnosed. Because of its experience in the development of the underlying conceptual foundations of Knowledge Management, the Executive Information System is able to identify, formulate and evaluate knowledge processing and knowledge management problems within Hilton London Paddington.

• Expert System:

The Expert System is meant to solve real problems of Hilton London Paddington which normally would require hiring a human expert to solve them (Harvey, 1990). Building the Expert system therefore first involves the extraction of the crucial information from a human expert. Such knowledge is often characterized as heuristic in nature. However, the extraction of relevant information from an expert in a way that can be used by a computer is generally a difficult task. Therefore, a knowledge engineer is needed to do the job of extracting this knowledge and building the expert system knowledge base.

The first attempt in the construction of the Expert System would unlikely be very successful. This is partly because the human expert generally would find it very difficult to express the necessary knowledge and rules needed to solve the problem. Much of it is almost subconscious, or appears so obvious that most human experts don't even bother mentioning it. Knowledge acquisition for the Expert System would involve a big area of research, with a wide variety of techniques that also need to be developed. However, the Hilton London Paddington first developed an initial prototype based on the relevant information extracted in the interview of the human expert, then made some refinements on it based this time on the feedbacks coming from both the human expert and from the potential users of the Expert System.

In order to do such refinements from the prototype it is important that the Expert System must be written in such a way that it can easily be inspected and modified. The system should be able to explain its reasoning and also be able to answer questions regarding the solution process. The system updating must not involve rewriting a whole lot of codes. It must include simply the addition or deleting localized chunks of knowledge.

The most widely used knowledge representation scheme for expert systems is rules. Typically, the rules do not have certain conclusions, but there is some degree of certainty that the conclusion will hold if the conditions hold also. Statistical techniques are often used to determine these certainties. Rule-based systems, with or without certainties, can be easily modified, thus making it easy to provide helpful traces of the system's reasoning. These traces can be further used in providing explanations of what it is doing.

Expert systems have long been used to solve a wide range of problems in domains which include medicine, mathematics, engineering, business, law and education. Within each domain, they have been used to solve problems of different types. Types of problem involve diagnosis (e.g., of a system fault or student error); design (of computer systems); and interpretation (of, for example, geological data). The necessary problem solving techniques tend to depend more on the type of the problems rather than on the domain. 

C. Hotel Automation System:

The Hotel Automation System of Hilton London Paddington provides the incorporation of important hotel documents of all types through the integration of images into the Automation System (1993). The System include applications such as word processing, database, and mail, all of which are able to access image documents. The storage of document images is made possible through the utilization of a variety of storage media such as microfilms and optical disks. An image access subsystem, on the other hand, provides to each of the Hotel Automation applications the uniform access to images stored on all of the media. The image access subsystem can then be used as a hardware controller to handle some of the complex events in the retrieval of images from the image storage devices. A relational database system must be used in order to organize the stored images so as to provide flexible access to the images and to isolate any effects of reconfiguration of the image storage system.

Management Information Systems

MIS in our world

Management Information System (MIS)

• Management Information System(MIS)  is to provide right type of information at the right time to solve a business problem through decision making.

Examples

• Management information system is used in telephone companies. When we make a call to any one from our mobiles then automatically the information reaches to service provider company which checks the balance of mobile before making a call if there is enough balance to make a call then they allow us to make a call otherwise they"ll send a message that you don't have enough balance to make a call. When we ends the call they will calculate the time and deduct the balance according to them and send us the new balance which can done only by the the help of Management Information System(MIS).

• Management information system is used in banks also. When we do some online shopping they"ll ask for credit card number and when we complete the shopping then the information about the shopping will be automatically sent to bank and they"ll deduct the amount from the balance of that very person. This can be done only by the help of Management Information System(MIS).