Buyers Should Help OTA Set Standards

<B>Buyers Should Help OTA Set Standards</B>

The Open Travel Alliance is working on XML specifications that will make it dramatically easier to introduce new business processes into the travel industry. OTA's agenda includes making it easier for travel suppliers and intermediaries to work with corporations. But there is dangerously little input from these critically important customers about what they want, and how they would prefer to have it delivered.

Here's the background: Probably for the first time ever, the travel industry is trying to standardize on the same basic technology that is being widely adopted by its corporate customers. It's being collectively proactive about getting itself in sync. All the major ERP vendors, such as I2, Oracle and SAP, also are using XML as the glue to link their solutions with their customers' other systems. Many of those customers also have large internal system development projects using XML. XML is thus the lingua franca. In the words of Josh Walker of Forrester Research, "XML is the common language that makes data as portable between computer systems as Java makes program code portable between them."

By working on a common XML specification for the travel industry and its customers, OTA should be making it easier for all the parties involved to communicate as is necessary to achieve their business goals. For example, a corporate human resource department will, if OTA gets things right, be able to update agency, GDS and supplier customer profiles simultaneously, direct from its, for example, PeopleSoft system via XML. To understand the benefits of this, consider the benefits of any relevant change in employee profile information being immediately and automatically applied to the systems running at a corporation's travel partners.

Contrast this with today: Such updates often result from a demand for remedial bulk action to update a single partner because a senior manager has been mishandled. A lack of resources to do the data reformatting, or manual keying and checking, delays the process and the other partners remain out of sync.

OTA is making valuable progress. It published Version 1 of its specification in February, providing the customer profile specification needed for this kind of interoperability. The second joint OTA/HITIS meeting took place recently at Sun Microsystems in San Jose, taking forward integration of OTA's customer profile with the corresponding XML specification that the hospitality industry developed independently. Many of us, both inside and outside OTA, are impatient about the deliberate rate of progress, but this stuff is difficult and it's important to get it right, which takes me to my point: There's too little corporate involvement. Granted, among OTA's 150 member organizations there's extensive knowledge about how things used to be done. The travel suppliers have brought much to OTA's process. The many software and system suppliers (including the GDSs) and travel management companies in the Non-Supplier Work Group (which I chair) also are making major contributions. But our knowledge is largely secondhand: Very few corporations are members, and those that are members are insufficiently involved. As a result, there's a risk that OTA may only make it possible to reengineer the present, rather than enable the future. We need people to say, "What I'd really like is such-and-such a relationship with my trading partners, and this is the data we need to exchange in order to achieve this goal." Some of the possibilities are outlined in OTA's White Paper, most easily accessed via the link on www.lanyon.com.

It's been suggested that the Association of Corporate Travel Executives and the National Business Travel Association could represent their memberships to provide the necessary input. Both organizations have been supportive to OTA, but it's difficult to find in any one person the combination of business requirements, understanding, imagination and technical skills that is needed. There's an immediate opportunity for OTA and NBTA to work together on the changing data requirements for the transient hotel program RFP process, but this is, unfortunately, an isolated instance.

Andrew Menkes of HSBC Bank has been eloquent in this space about the need for corporate travel managers to take control of travel process costs. He has been very supportive of OTA, but we also need the involvement of his visionary peers, in his words "to look to the stars (our future)." There are a few with the necessary vision and technical understanding themselves. With the tight integration of the travel management process with other corporate systems that OTA is working to enable, there should be others who can get their IS colleagues to join the team.

The prize is faster delivery of the future. First, however, we have to design it, and to do this we need to expand the team to include not only corporate travel managers, but also their colleagues from the other departments that XML makes it possible to integrate into the travel process more tightly.

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Nick Lanyon is on the Open Travel Alliance board and is chairman of Lanyon Inc., the travel technology company based in Arlington, Texas.