The Development of an Evaluation Framework for Determining the Productivity and Effectiveness of Internet Room Diagramming Solutions

Abstract

Internet Room Diagramming Solutions (RDS) has been regarded as not only one of the most innovative Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) marketing media for raising the profiles of hotel and convention centre properties, but also as a practical tool to try out and to communicate planners' ideas on meeting and event designs. However, there is little research specific to RDS in the hospitality management and the event management research fields. In the first phase of this research, a three-round modified Delphi technique was employed with an expert panel to generate, validate and prioritise a comprehensive set of dimensions and criteria for measuring the productivity and effectiveness of a leading RDS in the marketplace, and a hierarchical structure of these dimensions and criteria is presented. Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) was used in the third round to generate relative priorities and to give weightings of these dimensions and criteria. In the phase two of this research, an AHP survey was conducted with the venue operators in the U.S. chain hotel systems for revalidation of the priorities and weightings of the dimensions/criteria which had been previously identified by the Delphi Panel experts. The client base of the leading RDS provider, MeetingMatrix, was used to conduct this survey. Forty-eight effective responses from the survey results have successfully revalidated some of the relative priorities in comparison with the Delphi results. Consistency exists in the priorities of criteria in Impact on Business Partner Relationships, Impact on Customer Satisfaction and Organisational Context. The criteria identified in this research could be adopted in order to conduct further research concerning performance measurements such as the ICT Balanced Scorecard for strategic management. The research methodology and approaches used could also be applied to performance measurements for general innovative ICT applications such as social media.