Education, Education, Education
The case for common standards has to be made clearly to the industry, says the GSA
In order to help implement common standards, the Gaming Standards Association has to convince the industry of their value. That involves educating the existing workforce and the next generation of decision makers. Operators and equipment suppliers talking to their own staff are already doing some of this educational work in-house. The GSA focuses on industry best practice in technology education in order to help develop an educational programme of its own.
“One of my goals in Asia was to establish a relationship with an educational institution that allows us to bring people to Macau and start educating them. We chose Macao Polytechnic Institute two years ago. The relationship enables us to bring people to Macau and have them trained on GSA-industry supported open technology standards,” says Peter DeRaedt.
Professional training is now widely accepted across different industries as a rolling, career-long process, reflecting the pace of change in business practise driven by evolving technology. Few sectors can beat gaming when it comes to fast-paced change. The commercial penalties for companies that fail to embrace this rate of change could be very high. If an operator’s technology cannot communicate, it can result in duplication, triplication or even mass-multiplication of effort in running systems and inputting data, suggests the Association.
“A customer’s name might be entered in a casino system, say a bonusing system, one particular way, with their given names first. However, if you go to the hotel reservations system you might find that the check-in system enters names differently, i.e., family name first. Why? Why is there a need to enter the same information in different systems and in different formats? It happens if you have one operator or several operators using multiple proprietary communication protocols,” states Mr DeRaedt.
