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Computerworld - PALM DESERT, Calif. -- Tim Stanley, senior vice president and CIO at Harrah’s Entertainment Inc., sat down with Computerworld at its Premier 100 IT Leaders Conference yesterday to talk about the lessons learned from integrating IT systems after its purchase of Caesars Entertainment last year. “Speed is key,” said Stanley, who also detailed some of the other IT projects Harrah’s is working on. Excerpts from the interview follow:

What is the current status of integrating Caesars’ IT systems since the acquisition closed in June? We have broken it up in three phases. Infrastructure itself is completed. All of the back-of-the-house finance, payroll, procurement, human resources and the like was completed before the end of the year. The third and arguably the most impactful customer and operational piece started the day after the transaction closed, [and] we completed our first entire front-of-house system conversion ... to a common set of platforms on Dec. 7. We have now completed eight properties of 13, with our ninth property starting [Monday night]. We’ll be done around the middle of April. We will relaunch Total Rewards [a customer loyalty program] as a brand that we’re calling TR3 and come back with the second round of enhancements at the tail end of that.

You mentioned that the day the transaction closed you were actually sending data back and forth between the properties. What are some of the main lessons learned from this acquisition in terms of integration that you can take forward with future acquisitions? Different companies you merge or acquire may have different value propositions. At the end of the day, we figured out that moving quickly, more aggressively, is important. The quicker we get people, processes and systems integrated, the better. Speed is key. The agility piece does play in because you have to look at what are those nuances and differences. If you went in and just said, "Our stuff is going to be the stuff that you implement across the board," you end up with a variety of different gaps in business processes, customer issues [and] employee resistance.

Tim Stanley, senior vice president and CIO of Harrah’s Entertainment Image Credit: Asa Mathat

In the case of Caesars, we then understood we wanted to get in very, very quickly and put joint integration teams in place. We also brought in third parties that we could use in this clean-room type of environment [while restrictions were in place pending regulatory approval] that we could use to do a lot of data discovery and