A guest embarking on the Queen Mary 2—the world’s newest, biggest and most expensive ocean liner—pulls out her smart card and hands it to a smiling security officer in a crisp, white uniform, who scans her through. After settling into her cabin, she flicks on the digital interactive TV and fires off a couple of e-mails. A few clicks away she browses the evening’s dinner menu, then orders a bottle of pinot noir, which will be on her table when she arrives at the restaurant. Following some after-dinner entertainment in the theater, she heads back to her cabin, pipes in some Mozart from the TV system’s vast music library, orders room service for breakfast and falls asleep.

The $800 million QM2, built by Cunard Line, a unit of Carnival, weighs in at 151,400 tons and, at 1,132 feet, is a mere 116 feet shorter than the structural height of the Empire State Building. She’s the first Cunard cruise ship built in more than three decades, since the company launched the Queen Elizabeth 2 in 1969, and the only regularly scheduled cruise liner crossing the Atlantic. (The QE2 is now cruising in European waters.) The ship boasts 10 dining venues, a planetarium, a casino, a two-story theater and five swimming pools. Hot tubs and the Canyon Ranch Spa offer relief for muscles sore from shuffleboard. Some 1,250 crew members cater to upwards of 2,600 passengers, a cozy ratio for guests (most big ships have a considerably higher passenger to crew ratio). The QM2 made her maiden voyage, from Southampton, England, to Fort Lauderdale, Fla., in January. In April, the QM2 sailed from Southampton to her U.S. home port of New York City, where she was greeted with a rousing welcome.

The smart cards and interactive TVs are just a couple of examples of the vast IT capabilities built into the behemoth. The QM2 is a floating city, with integrated systems that make it arguably the most technologically advanced vessel on the ocean. But incorporating IT onto the ship was far from smooth sailing. One of the biggest challenges facing Cunard’s IT department was its relative inexperience—the company hadn’t built a ship in more than 30 years and didn’t have a separate shipbuilding IT division as some cruise lines do. In addition, the QM2 was a new class of ship, so there was no preexisting design to help guide the IT leaders as they plotted major issues like cable drops. And to add more complexity to the mix, they didn’t have access to the ship (which was constructed in France) until late in the building process, so the staff had to construct a deployment center in Miami to build and test the systems. Recently, CIO was invited on board for a day to take a closer look at the IT powering Cunard’s newest member of the royal family and find out what sorts of challenges the company’s IT staff faced in designing and installing a technology infrastructure from the bottom up.