They are here. They are buying, selling and spending. Our industry has attracted some powerful new owners—real-estate companies. They are playing the numbers—adding and subtracting hotel portfolios, often in large chunks. They are not afraid to spend money to improve the value of their assets, and our industry is benefiting in some less-noticed ways.

Technology is one of the hidden winners. Owners want to measure and track their portfolios, operationally and from an asset-performance viewpoint. Their aggressiveness, scale and compressed timeframes have triggered technology spending focused on measuring and managing the performance of their hotel assets. They want to see everything at the enterprise level, and see it today.

The International Society of Hospitality Consultants listed technology as one of the top three challenges facing the hospitality industry in 2007. Our industry is not consistent in its investment in technology, often choosing to invest in furniture, fixtures and equipment rather than technology—especially behind-the-scenes.

With portfolios competing for resources, owners have a more critical need to measure and manage hotel performance at the enterprise level. Owners with ambitious timetables looking for better answers are using resources from both inside and outside the industry to improve performance management. Their approach is pragmatic. They are outsourcing and using consultants to solve problems quickly. They are demanding more and advancing performance management in our industry.

Giants do cast large shadows, but they also bring good ideas, different perspectives and new resources to our industry. Some examples:

• Exception management with mega portfolios is a necessity, not an option. Large owners are gathering and sifting incredible amounts of information on a daily basis, with a need to push distilled "action" alerts and reports to the right managers, the same day. Notification via handheld electronics and common portals are the traffic of the newest enterprise engines.
• Dashboards at all levels. It starts with the enterprisewide collection of daily operational information. It includes "normalizing" and synchronizing the information from diverse and often legacy technology platforms (gritty, hard work). It finishes with timely, meaningful metrics and measures assembled and presented graphically at the property, regional, divisional, brand and enterprise levels.
• Scale—bigger brings some new and different vantage points. Owning hundreds, or potentially thousands of properties and having access to performance information across so many brands, markets, segments and asset types presents new opportunities and technology demands. Scale plus technology can produce meaningful comparisons across hundreds of metrics to help make decisions about the best (and worst) performers.