CIO interview: Lee Cowie, chief technology officer, Merlin Entertainments
Summary
No day ever really feels like working for me.” Cowie is leading a tech-enabled business transformation at Merlin, the world’s second-largest operator of family entertainment destinations. We spun them up in a matter of weeks.” While all this innovation took place, Cowie’s team also had a series of important technology projects to roll out, including updating and modernising Merlin’s back-end systems. “When you look at the complexity of the Merlin business, with its hotels, restaurants and retail outlets, if you didn’t have a partner at the scale of Oracle, and the suite of technology it has, I would be spending all my time integrating and customising systems spread out across a really large geography – and it would be much harder if we weren’t partnering with Oracle.” Cowie has continued to focus on innovative solutions to intractable business challenges as Merlin enters the post-Covid age. As its venues and hotels have reopened, so his team has had to think carefully about how technology can help to prioritise customer safety in a business model that is based around bringing people together. • Michael Cole, CTO, European Tour and Ryder Cup: The highly traditional sport of golf is proving to be an innovator in its field, with internet of things technology and cloud adoption transforming tournaments after Covid.