DTS To Meet Rollout Deadline
<B> DTS To Meet Rollout Deadline</B>
By Barbara Cook
Arlington, Va. - The Defense Department still expects to roll out its much-publicized Defense Travel System in November, although project manager Col. Al Arnold told delegates at the recent Society of Travel Agents in Government conference here that DTS has run into technical "challenges" that involve "pushing through the firewalls" at the Defense Department.
DTS is an electronic trip request and payment system being developed by TRW Inc. of McLean, Va., under a Department of Defense contract valued at $263.7 million. TRW will own and maintain the travel application servers and secure gateway while DOD will purchase the services of the system and own the data.
The system initially will be deployed to DOD travelers in the 11-state Defense Travel Region 6 in the Northwest. DOD envisions eventually deploying the system departmentwide to as many as three million travelers. In an update for STAG delegates, Arnold said on Sept. 9 that his plan still is to finish testing DTS in October and begin deployment in DTR-6 in November. However, Arnold said, "we have run into some challenges that we didn't know we had. I am happy to report they aren't in travel functional areas. We have that area absolutely nailed down."
One problem area, Arnold said, is "getting computers to talk to computers across the entire Department of Defense-- not the easiest thing to do. DTS is doing some things for the first time inside the DOD and a couple of things that have never been done before inside the federal government, and in the industry."
Arnold also told delegates that "a lot of decisions at DOD about information security are funneled down from the top. What we found was there are some differences we should have known about. I suspect some of you run into the same things if you are trying to implement things with different government entities."
National security challenges are involved due to the use of the Internet in the system and the DTS team must be vigilant about security, Arnold said. "I wouldn't want to see in the Washington Post on the front page, 'Hacker Hacks Into The Pentagon Classified System. How Did He Get There? Through The Defense Travel System.' "
While the DTS project team faces technical challenges, Arnold said, "there is absolutely no doubt in my mind, absolutely none, that we have the solutions in the near term." He said the team has resolved individual problems with DOD computer firewalls and now needs to develop an "appropriate solution departmentwide." Arnold predicted that DTS may well set a precedent for e-commerce within DOD for other non-classified applications.
Kay Anderson-Hager, chief of the travel service acquisition management branch at DOD, told delegates that follow-on contracts to DTR-6 will cover 18 geographical areas in the continental United States, with multiple awards that combine both official and leisure travel. The DTR-6 contract, the only one to be awarded so far, separated the official and leisure segments, with American Express winning the official travel side and SatoTravel winning the leisure contract. However, Anderson-Hager said that DOD is continuing to evaluate the feasibility of awarding official and leisure contracts as a single unit. RFPs for the next contracts should be posted this month with award dates scheduled for late April 2000.
Outside the United States, DOD will have two travel solicitations, one for Europe and one for the Pacific. The draft RFP should be posted in December; awards will be made in July 2000.
DOD's ultimate goal is to have 100 percent electronic ticketing, Anderson-Hager said.
John Argodale, chief of DOD's finance branch, outlined the planned pricing policy for the follow-on contracts. For official travel, the policy will call for agents to provide DOD with a percent of the prevailing commission rate as posted by the Airlines Reporting Corp. This type of system "shares the risk of volatility" over declining airline commission rates, he said, because it is not a fixed percentage and will be adjusted as the ARC rate changes.
Travel agents have been lobbying DOD to scuttle the rebate system entirely and go with fee-based pricing, a step the department so far has declined to take.