Avoid being disrupted by aligning travel and technology outcomes

Travel firms were advised to seek aligned outcomes with their technology suppliers to reduce complexity and waste.

Travel firms were advised to seek aligned outcomes with their technology suppliers to reduce complexity and waste.

Speaking at this week’s Institute of Travel and Tourism conference in Ras Al Khaimah, Jonathan Greensted, founder of software developer Sentient One, said the IT industry has often made things seem more complex because it benefits technology firms in terms of man hours and costs.

“Complexity to the travel industry means extra costs. We need to find a way of changing this and aligning outcomes.

“The IT industry is incentivised to keep things difficult, to keep the status quo. It’s my belief that the travel industry is held back by some of its legacy IT. We are starting to see what’s possible when you are not encumbered by legacy.

“As an industry we need to disrupt or be disrupted.”

Greensted said true disruption will come from the many travel start ups that emerge each year, built with modern flexible technology.

He said travel firms should simply their technology on the basis of having a minimum viable IT infrastructure.

“In the digital world complexity kills innovation,” said Greensted.

“Traditionally creating software was a difficult task, it was time consuming therefore large monolithic applications had to be built to solve every problem and they became the legacy. Today software can be created in hours, you can release new releases daily, you can run tests daily.”

Greensted claimed security issues are also more easily solved with ‘small technology’ and it costs less.He added while geeks like to build new stuff firms should put customers first.

“But the challenge is we do not generally know what the customer wants and to make the situation worse they do not know until they see it.”

Greensted said his pet hate was the term Customer Relationship Management.

“Customers do not want to be managed, they want to be related to, they want to build relationships.”