Adrian M. Butler

Vice president of IT, telecommunications and support services, Accor North America, Carrollton, Texas

• Project at a glance: The hotel operator expanded network bandwidth and made other technology enhancements, such as adding Wi-Fi for its Motel 6 brand.
• Signature leadership move: Marshaled support for a network upgrade by identifying key business-unit leaders.

Butler, 37, knew that the aging frame-relay network that had been supporting Accor North America's Motel 6 business "wasn't fitting the bill anymore," as he puts it.

Problem was, any proposal to upgrade the existing frame-relay network infrastructure would have to compete for funding with other projects throughout the company. And unlike the types of IT projects that would have a more visible impact on the business, a network upgrade didn't carry a clearly quantifiable return on investment, notes Butler.

"So I worked with business counterparts in dissecting their needs and worked through the organization politically," says Butler. "It came down to finding people in the organization with a voice."

For instance, Butler discovered that Accor's training department was in need of additional network bandwidth to support its use of e-learning tools. Through his legwork, he found that other business divisions also required additional network capacity. So he worked with leaders from those departments to solicit their support and began communicating those requirements to the company's top executives.

Butler's efforts included determining what changes Accor needed to make to its network infrastructure to support its expanding business and operational requirements. He did this in large part by listening to business advocates, Accor's technical teams and other people throughout the organization.

To devise a new network strategy, Butler put a lot of energy into educating business executives and key stakeholders on the need for a new network infrastructure -- in terms they could understand.

"I spent a lot of time at the beginning to make them comfortable with the language," he says. That included avoiding technical jargon and clearly explaining the benefits that a network upgrade could deliver.

Accor also wanted to increase its network bandwidth to support new customer relationship management and point-of-sale applications that are currently being added. For instance, Accor is beta-testing property management systems that will be rolled out to 100 Motel 6 locations by the end of this year, says Butler.

Around the same time it was upgrading its network, Accor was working on a separate project to encrypt customers' credit and debit card transactions as required by the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard.