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
Recognize - Cisco doesn't do deployments themselves, it's 100% a partner organization. They are very hands on due to the complexities of the product. They virtually dedicate Cisco people to support them and be onsite as part of the team.. (spend enough money.. and Cisco will just plant people onsite indefinitely) but at the end of the day it's a partner that has the contract. Just a tangent there...
The point of my earlier comment was about the mentality of.. take today's hated piece of the puzzle today.. and blame spending 1.5 billion on it. Next time a new piece of the puzzle becomes visible.. repeat the process again, blaming spending full cost on that too.
NextGen was a technology initiative early on.. and while it has has the personalized 'tag' at the core of many of the concepts.. there is so much more too it (especially when talking what cost money). Let's just list out some of things that had to happen to move the basic framework forward for Disney..
How many PoS terminals will Disney replace? Thousands I bet
How much will the PoS software changes will cost?
How much will changes to all the reservation systems will cost?
Development of new mobile device software that integrates with park ops, existing reservation systems, and new systems as well? (iPhone apps, etc)
Door locks on 30,000+ hotel rooms...
Hotel software at every property...
Changing the software and hardware at hundreds of ticketing/GR locations...
Changing the software and hardware at every park entrance...
Wifi infrastructure at literally 1,000+ locations...
Cast Member training...
Internal overhead on the project...
Oh, and all of that is before anyone thinks about storing data and doing business intelligence with the tag. All of the above would be necessary even if Disney didn't retain anything but a customer ID and credit card for billing. One could do all that and simply call it 'modernization'. But that's a huge chunk for ANYONE to do at once.
So I shake my head when people go on about spending a billion dollars on just datamining or personalization. All of the above was just foundation to build NEW applications and experiences on. And once they have it they can do new things.. like
FP+ reservation platform..
FP+ terminals through out the parks...
FP+ terminals for cast members..
integration to all customer facing Disney World websites
Numerous (unknown how many) Interactive Queues...
talking characters...
Install beacon detection at hundreds? thousands? of locations through the park
Build 'big data' platforms capable of handling and manipulating data that is probably on the level of 'unique in the world'
Build all the infrastructure and software to support interacting with that 'big data'
Build the business intelligence apps to draw meaningful references or conclusions from the data
and THEN spend again to figure out how to feed that new 'knowledge' back down into the systems.. like reservation.. sales.. direct marketing.. park ops..
Then figure out how to package the data to partners for value
Oh.. and do all of that on a property that hands millions of customers a year, operates 365/24/7, and is largely staffed by transient low-skilled labor.
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)
Yup - and that's a large part of my post above. So much of this is just flat out "infrastructure" for the business.. infrastructure that for a long time will be the foundation of many things. These initiatives now are finally the thing that pushed them from 'desires' to 'property wide implementation'. These things become a 'cost of business' that enable new things on top (like FP+, BI, personalization, etc).
So yeah, I grow tired of the '1.5 billion on FP+!!' or '1.5 billion on tracking me!' posts..
