Hyatt

The web presence for Hyatt brands, from luxury hotels to vacation resorts, consisted of separate sites with different branding, navigation and styling. The internal process to share updates was inefficient, as changes could be lost in email while brand standards were burned to DVD and mailed from the Chicago headquarters to international locations.

Mike Cohen, director of communication systems for Hyatt Hotels Corporation recalled: “We needed a communication tool that better connected our corporate and regional offices to our hotel colleagues to both disseminate key brand standards and policies, but also break down barriers and allow for more engagement and collaboration across the company.”

In 2008, Hyatt implemented “Hyattconnect,” its corporate intranet powered by OpenText. More than a decade later, Hyattconnect continues to deliver a unique intranet experience to almost 115,000 colleagues using OpenText™ Content Management, OpenText™ Portal and OpenText™ Web Experience Management.

“Hyatt places a great deal of value on its branding and on the beautiful and smart design of all of its properties,” noted Jose Santiago, who oversees the OpenText platform in his position as senior technical manager for intranet systems with Hyatt Hotels Corporation. “The intranet site must deliver and preserve the same impression to all its employees, regardless of where they are located or what role they perform.”

Every Hyatt employee relies on Hyattconnect for the latest corporate news, links, daily applications and searchable information. More than 200 content editors use Content Management to design and deploy Hyatt web assets in a consistent and timely manner to Hyatt’s intranet, thus ensuring uniform, modern and upscale branding. Hyatt Global ID, managed within OpenText, ensures employees access information and applications tied to their roles and authorizations for content personalization and security. Through Portal, Hyattconnect serves as a mission-critical entry point to other enterprise applications with a single sign-on.

Employees also use Hyattconnect’s Find feature to search for people, information or locations in the corporate directory with immediate results. They can do so from their desktops or on a mobile device.

Web Experience Management also supports other internal sites. Hyatt professionals use a modular API to create and update content in a preview environment before publishing it live.

“It allows us to build our website page content in a way that requires almost zero training,” Cohen related. “We can spin up responsive sites that can be very image intensive for our marketing groups with little to no training.”

Hyatt’s initial intranet project met technical design goals, but departmental content was sporadically entered at launch, causing the site to be viewed as an empty portal. With C-Level leadership stressing the site’s importance, content grew from 10,000 items to 220,000 items and eventually approached two million page views per month. Content, views and capabilities continue to grow supported by the OpenText scalable, hub-spoke design model, according to Cohen.

“We would have likely hit the limits of another content management system,” he noted. “We went with the OpenText Enterprise Content Management system and, 10 years later, we haven’t hit the limits on that software…we’ve been in a constant improvement cycle.”

Hyattconnect maintains brand consistency and promotes the Hyatt culture of excellence within the enterprise and across functions and countries.

“One of the main business objectives was to eliminate silos,” Santiago said. “Hyatt has separate regional operations but wanted a way for people in the company to think of themselves as working for the Hyatt organization as opposed to working for a distinct geographical business unit.”

Hyatt expects to continue its partnership and improvement cycle with OpenText, including content translation in an ever-changing international scene. The relationship thrives because OpenText “gets enterprise customers,” according to Cohen.

“When you partner with someone for 10 years…you have to look at replacing vendors if software gets contentious. We’ve never had that issue with OpenText,” he said. “OpenText seems to understand how to treat the relationship.”