In gaming, as in other industries where high touch with customers is central to revenue, the network is increasingly the heart of the business, and the top-level IT executive must take a personal interest in network design, deployment, planning and operations.

Like any utility, as long as the network is up and running, no one notices it. But the moment a lonely switch somewhere in the basement has a hiccup, all hell breaks loose, and the help desk is inundated with irate customer calls. Even when the network is running well, it's a popular scapegoat for everything from poor application performance to security breaches.

Viejas Enterprises is owned by the Viejas band of Kumeyaay Indians of Southern California. Viejas Enterprises owns and operates multiple business units, including a 2,500-slot casino, a 57-store shopping mall, entertainment venues, tribal government facilities, RV parks and more. Casino revenue has been growing at a double-digit rate in the past few years; in 2006, we added 500 new slot machines to a brand-new, 40,000-square-foot area.

To meet the requirements of this business growth, the IT team added infrastructure on an "as required" basis. Even though all our front- and back-end business systems depend on the network, as recently as 2003 (the year I joined Viejas) the network was a combination of switches and routers from multiple vendors. There was no scalable design, nor a consistent architecture to support future growth, let alone security.

The CIO as Network Futurist

To be successful, CIOs have to think like futurists, to foresee business expectations and plan their network capacity today to deliver business value tomorrow. For a casino, network capacity planning has become the most challenging exercise lately because the industry is undergoing a sea change in terms of technology standards and the use of Ethernet-based networking on slot floors. As a CIO, one has to leverage network capacity for current usage and plan for the network-intensive traffic that is just around the corner, such as audio and video.