Mr Lui Tuck Yew (right) presenting the National Infocomm Award to Mr Dennis Goh.

Less than three  months – that is how quickly GTW Holdings was able to roll out its new table reservation and management system, TableDB, thanks to a set of internal IT systems that has enabled the company to capture ideas more efficiently, communicate and project manage more effectively and gather timely feedback that it can respond to more quickly.

GTW Holdings is this year’s National Infocomm Award winner for the Most Innovative Use of Infocomm Technology in the Private Sector (SME). Its HungryGoWhere ( www.HungryGoWhere.com ) food and beverage digital media portal draws 800,000 unique visitors every month, generating 4 million monthly
page views.

“Don’t think of us as just a food website,” said GTW Holding’s Managing Director Mr Dennis Goh. “Our vision is to unite the global food community.”

He likened HungryGoWhere to TripAdvisor, a popular online portal for travellers. “TripAdvisor is really the start of a journey, where visitors can make travel-related purchases,” he said. Likewise, HungryGoWhere is not just a site where people read about food, they can also look for the places they can go to, make purchases, or network with their culinary soul mates. “We want to be the social networking platform for food lovers,” said Mr Goh.

But social media was not always what it is today. HungryGoWhere was started in 2007, at a time where popular opinion was against social media and people were saying that Facebook would not survive. “It has been a very humbling journey for us. It was very difficult to get it off the ground,” said Mr Goh.

In the past three years, however, there has been a social media revolution and HungryGoWhere has been able to build up a strong community of food lovers from five cities, contributing more than 40,000 food reviews and generating large amounts of rich media content that other food lovers can refer to in making their dining decisions. Today, the uniquely Singaporean moniker is also present in Kuala Lumpur, Hong Kong, Sydney and Melbourne.

GTW has also successfully launched food delivery services HungryDelivery.com and HungryBBQ.com and more recently, TableDB. The latter, which runs on the iPad, is completed with a prototype ready to be rolled out in October for testing with interested restaurant partners, within less than three months of the device’s launch in Singapore.

According to Mr Goh, behind this ability to roll out services quickly and to support its large community of users is a set of proprietary backend systems that allows GTW Holdings to better manage the portal and enable its IT programming team to deal with challenges more effectively.

For example, the Mobile Office allows staff to capture their ideas using a range of devices from iPhones to laptops, and then pushes these ideas to the project management system.

“Our staff work from anyplace, anytime, and inspiration does not just come between 9.30 am and 6.30 pm,” said Chief Evangelist Officer Mr Wong Hoong An. “With our Mobile Office system, whenever you have an idea, you can load up your comments and other people can source for that information at a later date, or you can drop a note and book our calendars so that we can meet up to discuss.”

The system also provides an integrated platform for communication and project management, ensuring the correspondence and processes are properly captured. “This has helped us to minimise miscommunication because discussions are now in black and white rather than purely verbal,” said Mr Wong.

A third key component of GTW’s backend systems are the measurement and tracking tools that enable it to integrate feedback from the portal and to respond to them in real time. “Feedback from users has been valuable in measuring our performance,” said Mr Goh. “After all, our real bosses are the customers out there.”