Compensation Type

Highgate Hotels

Highgate is a premier real estate investment and hospitality management company widely recognized as an innovator in the industry. Highgate is the dominant player in U.S. gateway markets including New York, Boston, Miami, San Francisco and Honolulu, with a rapidly expanding presence in Europe, Latin America, and the Caribbean. Highgate’s portfolio of global properties represents an aggregate asset value exceeding $20B and generates over $5B in cumulative revenues. The company provides expert guidance through all stages of the hospitality property cycle, from planning and development through recapitalization or disposition. Highgate also has the creativity and bandwidth to develop bespoke hotel brands and utilizes industry leading proprietary revenue management tools that identify and predict evolving market dynamics to drive out performance and maximize asset value. With an executive team consisting of some of the industry’s most experienced hotel management leaders, the company is a trusted partner for top ownership groups and major hotel brands. Highgate maintains corporate offices in London, New York, Dallas, and Seattle. www.highgate.com

Location

Highgate Corporate Offices Irving, TX

Overview

The Director, IT Services & Delivery – Full Service, reporting to the SVP IT, Hotel Operations, will lead with a clear vision of the level of service that constitutes high quality and demonstrate the leadership qualities to guide the team to attain this level of service. This will necessitate motivating people to rise to the challenges, to embrace new ways of working as well as generating buy-in from the internal team, GMs, and customers to enable best practice in hospitality. The role will encompass both the high-level management of day-to-day Service Delivery as well as developing strategies for the introduction of new or modified Services leveraging the use of 3rd party service providers to establish a Service Delivery function capable of scaling efficiently to meet the strategic growth objectives for the company.

The Director, IT Services & Delivery – Full Service is expected to understand hospitality technology and be able to provide advanced level management and direction for hotels utilizing Highgate best practices.

We are open to this position being remote based in other metropolitan locations.

Responsibilities

• This position will manage others and report directly to the Senior Vice President of IT, Service and Delivery.
• Creation of processes to promote and mentor a best practice service delivery environment between outsourced helpdesk, project management and hotel leadership.
• Take ownership and responsibility for ensuring delivery of high quality, customer focused IT services to Service Level Objectives agreed with the business.
• Ensure capital and operating IT budgets are met and executed appropriately at the hotel level.
• Work with 3rd party partners to ensure SLA is met and expectations are being properly set and delivered.
• Contribute significantly to the IT management team, IT strategy, budgetary control, and resolution of complex issues for the Full-Service portfolio of hotels.
• Must be able to manage large scale property management deployment globally.
• Must understand hospitality applications and the unique demands from the internal and external customers within hospitality.
• Oversight and responsibility for accurate and timely delivery of annual operating budgets for the Full-Service portfolio of hotels.
• Collaborate with Highgate IT leadership on hospitality technology initiatives.
• Must be able to manage time in a fast-paced company.
• Hotel Brand knowledge and experience would be ideal but is not a requirement.
• Creation and maintenance of Highgate Full-Service Property IT MSP standards of procedures.

Qualifications

• Five or more years managing hospitality technologies.
• Bachelor’s Degree in business, hospitality or technology related discipline or equivalent experience required. 
• Hospitality Management Company or Hotel Franchise Management experience is required.
• Management of a third-party IT Managed Service Provider or an internal helpdesk is preferred.
• Extensive IT support oversight of 3rd party managed service providers and/or IT support staff is preferred.
• Interpersonal Communication - Must possess strong verbal and written communication skills in many different formats including email, SMS, chat\messaging, voice\video conferencing and in-person meetings. This candidate will be able to communicate complex technology solutions to non-technical leadership in hotel operations, sales, conference, and executive positions. The ability to navigate frustrating situations involving multiple parties while maintaining discipline is key, when things go wrong, this leader needs to be the stability required to resolve. Including status updates, transparency up and down the team, and expectations. 
• Hospitality System Proficiency - The Director, IT Services & Delivery – Full Service needs to understand the uniqueness of hotel systems and infrastructure and how disparate systems share information, how those systems connect, and how they can fail. Knowledge of common hotel systems including PMS, POS, CRS, PBX, Wi-Fi, etc. is essential to his/her success. A comprehensive understanding of typical hotel networking and integration setups is also required.
• Teamwork - This role will work with many teams, this leader must be able to build and grow professional relationships with teammates at the brand level, hotel, regional and corporate levels and with technical and non-technical partners. Collaborate with teams in Accounting, Treasury, Sales, Operations, Finance, Asset Management, Revenue Management, and others. They will work with the Highgate IT team to deploy new solutions. The Director, IT Services & Delivery – Full Service will ensure that hotels are prepared for new brand standards as launched. Ensure proper training, feedback, and follow up are completed at appropriate milestones. Gauge success of implementations through post-deployment communications and find areas of improvement, and lessons learned.
• The Director, IT Services & Delivery – Full Service will seek opportunities to expand their skills and understanding of Hospitality Information Systems; to grow personally and professionally. 
• Estimated travel will be 35% as needed.