Pamela Mitchell
Corporate online booking tools have taken their knocks for being more cumbersome to use than consumer tools, but no system has taken more flakthan the U.S. Department of Defense's Defense Travel System, originally provided by Northrop Grumman and now managed by DoD's Business Transformation Agency. Managing roughly $11 billion in overall travel spend, or 60 percent to 65 percent of travel for the federal government, the Defense Travel Management Office is considering how to streamline an unwieldy 1,000-plus page travel policy and enhance DTS. Management.travel's Lauren Darson recently discussed DTS with DTMO director Pamela Mitchell. Excerpts follow.
What are some of your greatest challenges with DTS?
It was ahead of its time and really only in the last few years has commercial practice been catching up to the idea of a truly end-to-end system. Everything from allowing travelers to get approval to travel, to getting the reservations, to processing their request for reimbursement and getting paid, then archiving the data; it all happens through DTS. As it aged, it was recognized that we needed to update the system. One thing that was completed this past winter is a conversion of code to JavaScript. We expect that to allow us to make more changes to the system. Right now, what we are looking at is focusing our efforts on improving things that cause our users the most difficulty. DTS is a very good system; one of the reasons it can't be a great system right now is because we have so much policy. It's over 1,000 pages, and if you look at the private sector and commercial practice, you are talking about 10 to 35 pages perhaps of policy. The entire government of Canada only has about 150 pages. Our 1,000 pages are really embedded in 2,000 pages of regulation. We are now focusing on simplifying our policy so that we truly can make a good system, a great system. The big contributing factor to the complexity of the system is our rule set. Different reasons for travel means that there are different things that you are entitled to, and when you are entitled to different things, then things get to be computed in a different way--you have a domino effect of complexity.
Following a Government Accountability Office report released to the House armed services subcommittee, DoD in September 2010 was tasked with making DTS more user-friendly and reducing the size of that policy. What is the update on meeting those requirements?
We believe that 99 percent of folks will do the right thing, if they can figure out what that is. Given our complexity of policy, the best way that we can do that now is to actually train folks. We have done a lot of work in creating and actually implementing a training program that is not just for travelers, but also for travel administrators and managers. For fiscal year 2010, we issued over 386,000 certificates of successful training of web-based modules and we held over 150 distance learning courses that had about 120,000 employees. There used to be a help desk for DTS. We said a help desk was great, but it's focused only on the system and it's focused only on a small percentage of super users. In 2007 [DTMO introduced] something that we call the Travel Assistance Center; it is an operation that goes 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and is available to provide assistance to the travel community. The focus there is really to provide accurate, courteous and timely service. Then we have an online extension of that called Travel Explore, which is a user-friendly web solution. Both TAC and Travel Explore are not just about they system, they are about answering questions on anything related to travel.
Is there an estimate of how many transactions are being processed through DTS?
On average we process over 30,000 transactions a day through the travel system. Since 2006, one of our big efforts has been to push use of the system, and we have effectively doubled its usage in the last five years. We have about 100,000 unique users accessing the system daily.
What has DTMO done to consolidate transaction costs?
There were 100 different commercial travel office contracts managed by over 50 different organizations in DoD. Just the thought of that is a little bit staggering. At this point in time we have approximately 40 contracts managed by one organization, and that is the Defense Travel management Office. We actually manage those contracts on behalf of our customers to look out for our customers and to ensure that they are all getting the same level of consistent service. We can take care of problems when they come up and solve those to everyone's advantage, but one of the really great things that happened when we started consolidating was we were able to reduce our fees. In the CTO world, we have small business contracts, and these were implemented from 2005. Under the old contracts, travelers were paying anywhere from $7 to $40 in fees. Under the contracts that were awarded again by 2007, we now pay just over $4 to about $25.50--so you can see that is fairly significant savings. Then we have our worldwide task order--these are our bigger task orders that we implemented from the period of 2008 to 2011. We used to pay $10 to $50 in fees; now we pay anywhere from just over $4 to $37. The reason we talk in ranges is because we do have different contractors, so the fees vary a bit depending on which contract is in place. The low side is the online and the high side is the more traditional assistance.
Are there any plans to incorporate the U.S. General Services Administration's second-generation E-Gov Travel Serviceinto a newer version of DTS?
DTS is aging, and we do believe that we will need a next-generation travel system. We don't know at this point what that means; we are still exploring. A large part of what we do will really depend on being able to simplify our policy. There are 76 different trip types in DoD and well over 200 different reasons to travel. We built a model and we are looking for the consistencies among those so that we can group those together. What we would like to be able to see--this is not work for the faint of heart--is this reduced to a manageable amount. We don't quite know what that is yet, but certainly it's not 76 trip types with over 200 trip purposes. For example, if all types of travel are for training why wouldn't that be one type of travel called training? There might be some one-offs in there but what we are trying to do is look at this from a common-sense point of view and take all of these different things and put them into categories. I don't have a page number in mind--certainly it's not 1,000--and it's too soon for us to be able to say what the number is. We would like to come down from 76 to over 200 [trip purposes] down to the range of 10 to 15 things that we can get our arms around in terms of consolidating. If you go back to thinking about a domino effect, everything that flows from that would be much simpler, which would let us have a system that is simpler to manage and simpler to use and certainly more user-friendly. The article originally was published in Business Travel News.