Sharing Data: A Business Requirement
<B> Sharing Data: A Business Requirement</B>
By Michael Whitesage
<hr><I>Michael Whitesage is president of Prism Group Inc., a travel system development and consulting firm based in Albuquerque, N.M.</I><hr>
Since the advent of the first export of agency data for corporate reporting¬Sabre's ADS Relational Handoff¬12 years ago, data exports have become a standard feature of agency accounting systems. The untold story is that securing travel data exports was a long and often contentious process. Sometimes a chess match, other times contact football, gaining access to travel data has always been a challenge.
Today, Prism has assisted more than 30 systems create data exports that, we estimate, comprise over 20,000 IATA locations worldwide. While some data consolidators have made their exports proprietary, Prism's exports have always been open and public. These data may be used by any corporate information system or independent corporate data warehouse, but data exports are not created equally.
While the data elements, such as carrier code or passenger name, may be the same, how the data are treated depends on the source. Does a refund contain the original invoice number so the transaction can be reconciled? Does the transaction include the IATA number so the ticketing location can be identified? Are all of the characters for the fare basis coded included? These are all issues critical to the integrity of data, but are guaranteed to bore most reasonable people.
After years of effort, Prism could count many exports, but the quality of the data remained maddeningly uneven. Last year, however, we recognized a remarkable opportunity. In their rush to escape the Y2K guillotine, system houses were either engaged in intense upgrade efforts or retiring old systems and rewriting new ones. What better time to improve data exports, many of which had not been enhanced in years?
The next question we asked was how to motivate these groups to upgrade their exports.
Last summer, we established a data export standard and proposed to certify the quality of data exports. Here are some of the results of our experience:
Export formats are as diverse as ever. Today, we are as far from a standard export of travel data as we were at the outset. Since systems treat data differently, their data behave differently when exported. So why pursue a standard at all?
First, before beginning any work, system houses ask for an export specification. Although the end products vary widely, they all want a starting point. System houses want a single standard.
Exports are costly to develop and maintain. Facing demands to develop many exports, developers are seeking a single quality standard. The OpenTravel Alliance aspires to develop industry data exchange standards.
Prism donated its Xport to the OTA as a starting point. In contrast to some agencies that are paying systems to write proprietary, exclusive exports, Prism's export is open and free. If exports are diverse, then imports must carry the burden.
For every export, we have written a unique import. Data are only fit to use once they have been consolidated into a normalized database. Seeking a consolidated database for your business? Your due diligence should weigh heavily on the normalization process.
Certification criteria must be selective. Certifying data for quality does not require a study of every element. By sampling key elements, such as segment data, refund processing and unique transaction identification, we could reliably determine the quality of the export. Data quality improves when results are public.
Here is the good news: The data sources do care about how their data is perceived. It was only when we informed each source that we would publicize their data ranking that they took steps to improve the data. Over a six-month period, certification scores improved 30 percent when we worked to assist the sources to improve their ranking. The work continues.
While data from U.S. systems is generally excellent, international data are very uneven. We are now working with international systems to secure segment data and improve data quality. Over the next two years, the global data situation will improve markedly.
Wrestling an export from an agency system provider is not a pleasant task. While the data are uneven, we can depend on being treated with distrust and suspicion. Remarkably, those who benefit most from our efforts often register the loudest protests.
In the end, I will be satisfied if we achieve our goal of reliable data flowing freely between suppliers, data consolidators and corporate users. After all, in the age of information, sharing data is a business requirement.