Prism Makes Waves W/ Attempt To Rate Industry Data

<B> Prism Makes Waves W/ Attempt To Rate Industry Data</B>

By Mary Ann McNulty



<i>Albuquerque, N.M.</i> - Trying to solve the age-old problem of consolidating disparate air data from travel agencies, global distribution systems and independent software developers, Prism Group Inc. has developed a universal data exchange format and begun to grade vendors on their performance.

In devising, publishing and certifying vendors' performance to this standard, Prism Group president Michael Whitesage hopes to lead a general improvement of travel management data. But he also has set off a whirlwind of protest from those who say his approach is a step backwards from the open standards IT professionals are embracing, and vendors who questioned his methodology.

Prism isn't trying to make money from the certification process, Whitesage said, but "simply trying to improve the quality of the data."

The goal is to spend less time cleaning up data and more time analyzing it, said vice president Les Baker, and the standard should help back-office system vendors, allowing them to write to just one standard. Prism's effort focuses only on air data, as hotel and car data from the agency systems represent bookings only and are totally unreliable, the company said. Corporations should be relying on credit card vendors or their suppliers for this data. Prism has developed a car data standard that also is available to anyone who wants it, Whitesage said.

The Group's "Prism Xport White Paper" noted that the data from 30 vendors it's been evaluating has improved 49 percent in five months. After the initial round of testing, the average score for the 30 systems was just 578 on a scale of 1,000, an F on its letter grade scale. Individual score ranged from 275 to 1,035, including the bonus categories that can push a top score to 1,060. As of this month, the average score is 869, with a letter grade of B+.

"Most suppliers have expressed commitment to the improvements required to elevate their letter grades to A," the white paper said. After retesting, Prism will publish updated scores on its Web site. Some systems that were evaluated will be phased out at year-end as they're not Year 2000 compliant. Scores of all these systems are reflected in the averages, but not included in the report.

Certifying 12 vendors believed to represent 90 percent of the sources of domestic travel data for companies with annual volume in excess of $1 million, the scores ranged from 1,035 for TravCom 8.1 to just 195 for Galileo Globalware. As a footnote to this low ranking, Prism explained that unlike most of its competitors, which include some type of corporate consolidation option as a menu option, Galileo's philosophy is to allow users to program their own database export. But this requires programming time and considerable know-how. "We think Galileo is taking the wrong approach," one that is costing corporations or their agencies, Whitesage said.

Galileo vice president of information services and operations Jim Lubinsky responded that "due to the historical absence of a common data standard" in the travel industry, Galileo "several years ago took an open systems approach--an accepted standard in the IT world."

Executives at International Software Products of McLean, Va., agreed with Galileo that Prism is making a serious mistake in heading away from open standards rather than embracing them. Said president Christopher Brittin, "Prism is talking about an export specification that is neither flexible nor extendable. Yes, the world needs standards, but standards that are controlled by a single corporation and inflicted on global suppliers are not in keeping with a real-world view. All industries are working toward data interchange standards, as evidenced by the articles in BTN on XML. From a technical point of view, I'm not impressed with the Prism approach."

ISP also is working on an industry standard for travel data, first by asking various vendors to list the data elements they currently have. Next, it plans to ask travel decision makers to prioritize the elements crucial to them.

Rosenbluth International had its own bone to pick with Prism. "We take issue with the scoring," said marketing vice president and CIO Neal Bibeau. "We'd be happy to subject our data to an objective third party rather than a competitive third party. We do compete with Prism, and I'm not sure this is an objective scale. Prism did introduce some new standards, and we would like to make it work for our customers who are also customers of Prism, but we are widely recognized in the industry for our data, and grading our capabilities against one small set of standards isn't the way to go."

Prism, meanwhile, said it will take its standards global, and release scores for systems used outside the United States in October. Many of these systems do not capture segment data, Whitesage said, and likely would score a D.

Segment data is captured in North America today because a consultant working on the very first agency consolidation bids for IBM and Hewlett-Packard in the 1980s demanded it, Whitesage said. In order to be able to bid on that business, agencies asked Apollo and Sabre to include the field in their back-office systems.

Acknowledging that inconsistencies in travel data capture and export have long posed problems, Baker said the globalization of more companies has put the issue in the spotlight. Prism Group also decided to push the issue this year as many vendors are already doing reprogramming to alleviate Year 2000 issues, Whitesage said.

"We've had the standard for a long time, but not gone out in a public way for certification," said Whitesage, who developed the Travel Manager's Workstation and then sold it to Sabre, which renamed it VantagePoint. Whitesage patented the process he used to determine origination and destinations.

Unlike others now trying to standardize data, Prism Group didn't seek industry or vendor input on the standards, contending is has the necessary expertise.

For Prism's certification, the systems were tested against seven data criteria categories: data elements or fields available; accounting or whether all transactions are properly netted and reconciled; data quality or whether all exported data is free of transmission errors; export report or whether the system provides a summary with which to verify the contends of the export; documentation and support or whether the system provides written instructions to perform an export; and miscellaneous, such as Y2K certification or whether a system is deployed in more than one country.

In the bonus category, Prism looked for unique components a system might provide, such as whether Prism Xport is provided as a menu selection or an agency system offers transfer via bulletin board or file transfer protocol.

The data elements category carried the most weight in the evaluation, representing 65 percent of the total score. Prism identified 254 unique data elements in travel data, with the most critical being the amount per destination segment, tour code often used to reflect negotiated discounts, fare basis code, ticket designator, carrier code and flight number for all segments, IATA number for all ticketing locations, and the departure and arrival date and time used to verify other elements.

Analyzing the data, Prism found 10 recurrent problems, all of which must be overcome during the normalization process so as not to compromise the validity of data. These included:

<B>1.</B> Missing elements between systems. If tour code is missing in one source, it will still be missing when passed to a second.

<B>2.</B> Missing time periods of days or weeks.

<B>3.</B> Incorrect data handoffs that might involve incomplete or incorrect companies or entire agencies.

<B>4.</B> Fields are truncated as different systems allocate space of different lengths for key data elements.

<B>5.</B> Refund/Exchange reconciliations are often not done with systems used outside the United States.

<B>6.</B> Interface modifications and revisions may change without notice or communications.

<B>7.</B> Currency notation is necessary to eliminate the potential for commas and decimals to be misread.

<B>8.</B> Host system reconciliation is necessary to allow users to verify contents of an export.

<B>9.</B> Data transmission errors caused by incorrect settings in the export.

<B>10.</B> Lack of a common dictionary of terms.