Accor’s digital transformation has its ups and downs. It began in 2014 with the appointment of its first chief digital officer, Vivek Badrinath. Sébastien Bazin, CEO of the hotel group, allocated a budget of 225 million euros over five years.
Several CDOs have succeeded since, and the company has gone through a global crisis. In 2022, it further reorganized with a split. This is enough to reduce the complexity of a group made up of 50 brands, 5,300 hotels and 10,000 restaurants.
Snowflake and the cloud as a cornerstone
In terms of data, the new chief data officer Jean-François Guilmard, attached to the CDO and member of the Comex Alix Boulnois, wanted to bring simplification and modernization. And it starts with a new data platform.
Its main building block, for storing and manipulating data, is the Snowflake cloud datawarehouse. Compute and storage are separated, which has advantages in terms of scalability, argues the chief data officer.
The cloud remains a central component in Accor’s new architecture. This is not a break for a group for several years already rallied to the cloud and a hyperscaler like AWS.
On data, the cloud has the advantage of providing “capacity to launch new products very quickly”, justifies Jean-François Guilmard, who spoke at the Assises de la Data.
Accor’s technology stack also includes the Privitar solution, “which allows us to meet the challenges of GDPR. Natively, we can anonymize and pseudonymize our data,” says the CDO.
Data Catalog in 2023
Finally, for the exposure of data to distinct populations, the group’s Data factory offers its advanced users Dataiku, as well as the Tableau solution, which has several thousand licenses.
In 2023, Accor will complete its platform with the deployment of a data catalog. This will make it possible to reference the different data sets, or golden sources, and to document them.
At the organizational level, data skills are centralized within the Data Factory. However, the profiles are divided into tribes corresponding to the main business areas of the company.
“What we wanted to make of the Data Factory is a center of excellence at the service of business, and a pole of attraction for the best talents”, comments the company’s chief digital officer, Alix Boulnois.
An atypical team organization
The challenge is indeed twofold: to generate value thanks to data products, and to attract rare skills. To take care of this attractiveness, the organization moved from a model by system to a declination by profession as well as an operation in OKR.
The CDOs also wanted to erase hierarchical links. “The operating model is a model of empowerment of multifunctional teams, which have common objectives and whose members determine their own rituals”, details Alix Boulnois.
Another argument to seduce and rethink the organization: teleworking. Employees have the possibility of being physically present in the office only four days a month. An approach that is not incompatible with employee commitment.
It will nevertheless have to prove its effectiveness with a year 2023 whose stated objective will be that of “accelerated value capture”.