How much of the NextGen budget do you propose is spent on the personal profiling aspects?
I'll take a few swings at this:
I think the biggest single area of expense for this whole thing is the network infrastructure: they're essentially doing a municipal wireless system over a fairly large geographic area. Figure on a normal day, there will be upwards of 100,000 devices on the various networks. By itself, this could easily be more than half the budget and is also probably where most of the overrun comes from. This is obviously Cisco's part of the deal. (Incidentally, this is also, IMO, the most necessary part of the whole thing -- Disney knows that the rising generation is attached to their digital umbilicals and that free internet/wi-fi access is already a cost-of-doing-business thing in the hospitality & large scale retail industries. That trend is not going to reverse any time soon -- in 10 or 20 years, this may be the equivalent of indoor plumbing)
The software I know a lot more about (stating that I know some of this for a direct fact is getting a little too close to a line I shouldn't cross). There are a number of layers in the software stack here that are customizable off-the-shelf products. Most of those aren't simple installs: a person or team of people from the software vendor take care of the installation, configuration, & testing over a period of weeks or months. What Accenture's doing is a combination of installing & configuring their own products along with coordinating the installation & configuration with the other vendors involved and with any software consultants an/or in-house developers writing the integration pieces necessary to tie in all of the old systems. Disney has had much of the necessary software in place for years: one thing we don't know is how much of that existing software is being used for this and how much is new installations. All told, though, this is probably in the $300-500M range (although it could be higher).
I don't think the FastPass/MyMagic parts are really all that big a part of the budget. That part is the most proprietary to Disney and the most likely to be done in-house: if anything, they may expand a development team or two. Tracking FP's issued through MyMagic is really no harder than tracking ADR's, and writing the front end planning pieces is no worse than any other reservation web service. This is stuff they've been doing for years. Even the part that checks fast pass return times is old hat if you assume that KimPossible was a prototype. There's been an expense associated with the development of the bracelets and the stage dressing for the RFID readers, but all this adds up to the single digit millions (maybe a little more, but I'd be suprised if it's anything like $50-100M)
There will be some staffing up and training: folks trained to use the various applications and a team brought in (or expanded, more likely) of statisticians to turn the raw data into useful information. Lots of time spent by lots of people on the marketing side figuring out all the messaging, but again, that's largely in house.
With all that -- the money spent on directly on personal profiling is in the new/upgraded software, development of the band, and installation of the readers. I'm going to speculate that it's really only about a third of the current expense (and shrinking as part of the total)
