David Wardell's Technical Reality

This analysis appeared May 17, 2013 in Cornerstone Information System's "Insight and Opinion" section:

However risky, making technology predictions is a popular and occasionally enlightening pastime. I've found it helpful to have a "watch list" of projects and products that might be influential or require some business strategy adjustment.

Here is my current travel industry-related list, in no particular priority. I've indicated why I believe each is important and what the effects might be. Some obvious choices such as IATA's NDC initiative are omitted as they are the subject of future posts.

This analysis appeared April 30, 2013 in Cornerstone Information System's "Insight and Opinion" section:

 

Data and their application have been a travel industry fixation since ADS was discovered over 30 years ago. When it became practical to collect the specifics of what travel customers were buying, suddenly it was an essential management task, effective competition hinged on being the best data manipulator, and travel managers were left to wonder what they should do with the piles of reports TMCs were cheerfully offering.

Most people are still wondering. Making better decisions that are enabled by travel data is a goal industry experts, acknowledge, respect, desire to achieve, and find surprisingly elusive.

A correct and productive data strategy for the travel industry is not difficult to identify, but its successful implementation requires discarding several cherished ideas.

This analysis appeared March 15, 2013 in Cornerstone Information System's "Insight and Opinion" section:

 

Recent popular discussions of "big data" (a surprisingly ill-defined term) are curiously silent on where these data may come from and who should decide where and how they are used. Perhaps this is because the current social media wave encourages individuals and businesses to surrender a degree of privacy (and hence control over data) in return for the promised benefits of whatever service is on offer.

"While we may believe that travel data ownership questions were settled long ago, control and ownership questions are more complex than many assume and require careful review regardless of how open or restrictive data access should be.

This analysis appeared April 9, 2013 in Cornerstone Information System's "Insight and Opinion" section:

Talking about "the travel industry" often invites criticism that it's impossible to generalize--travel companies of any description are not identical and can't be expected to behave as one. This ignores the experience of even casual observers, who see business decisions, successes, and failures widely replicated and frequently repeated throughout the travel industry over time.

There is a continuity within companies that operate in the same field, face similar market challenges, and who must compete with each other that causes them to align similar practices and strategies to an often surprising degree. What is referred to as "institutional memory, (the phenomenon where groups of people working together circulate and perpetuate the same ways of thinking over time), makes such alignments difficult to change.
One such area is ownership and management of the customer relationship. Travel vendors largely think they should be interacting with their customers directly and with as few intermediaries as practical.

This belief predates the coming of The Internet and electronic commerce--it's varied over decades but never disappeared. In many ways it's a stronger business force than on-line selling.

The fact that travel vendors generally don't do an especially good job of interacting with their customers, or of listening to them, doesn't cancel the desire to remove intermediaries.

Once again a new year brings another round of what passes for industry research. Although notoriously over-surveyed, the travel industry remains awash in bad data, ill-conceived and poorly executed research projects, and self-serving studies that are relevant more to the next round of funding or the next newsletter sale than to developing a real understanding of markets and trends.

Eventually the industry may get better at labeling useless research for what it is (the trend is not positive, however), but for now the very few good studies routinely drown amidst the hyperbolae of research that can't connect with real insight--or those that connect all too well because the result was fairly evident before the process began.

Nowhere is the problem more acute than in the online travel and social media worlds. High-priced research typically reinforces conventional wisdom and assumptions while key customer and behavior questions remain unresolved.

I've wondered aloud in past articles why major trade groups show such slight interest in these issues. If the online and social media worlds have such monumental consequences, what precisely could be more important to their members?

Here are a few suggestions for modeling forthcoming research projects. These are similar to suggestions I've made in public for 15 years, and hopefully they will help you appreciate the limitations of today's travel research and be positioned to improve it in the future.

In a 1961 address, President John F. Kennedy called for the United States to commit itself to "landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth" before the 1960′s ended. This goal was advanced together with a number of other national goals the president put forth at that time.

The space program, undoubtedly among the most enlightened and visionary initiatives of the 20th century, brought about untold advances in all scientific fields.  Among its short-term goals was to show the superiority of U.S. science, engineering, management, and political leadership.

Kennedy speaks of the initiatives he has just announced and says that we choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, "Not because they are easy, but because they are hard."

Few of us will be called upon to motivate an entire nation to action, but in the small ways we are asked to lead others, remember Kennedy's words and also remember that doing hard things is not only possible, it creates often insurmountable obstacles to competitors and adversaries.

Managing for peak performance is one of the most difficult tasks you'll ever attempt.  Whether your business is large or small, and whether you have major development projects in progress or simply want someone to handle training for three people, the formula for managing technology routinely eludes most people.