Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater

From a company travel management perspective, mobile technology creates many new opportunities and risks that have been described ad nauseum

• Travelers potentially benefit from thousands of new applications. Opportunity
• But these apps could lead to loss of control. Risk
• Travelers can be easily reached any time. Opportunity
• But information can leak, for example on Social Networks. Risk
• Travel Managers can see their role extended. Opportunity
• But they are not decision makers in mobile strategy. Risk

What do we see in practice? Growing tensions between travelers, whose new mantra is “freedom”, and the enterprise corporate departments in charge who on one hand want to embrace this blossoming world and on the other hand are often afraid of the potential consequences. This results in a much lower adoption rate than the number of articles and conferences on the topic would lead to believe. In this context, we start to hear an absurd but persistent tune: smart phones will be the end of Corporate Travel Policy.

Here is a typical way of framing it: you know what? Your travelers don’t give a shit about what you will allow them to do or not. If they can’t use their company device, then they will use their personal smart phone. They can get these apps whether you like it or not, and they are not going to ask for your blessing to do so.

Absolutely true, but what’s new here? While we can never emphasise enough the avenues opened by the growing usage of mobile devices, how you do things and what targets you pursue are two different matters.

In the last few decades, we have seen three major technological shifts:

• Mainframe to Client-Server (Windows PCs to be simple)
• Client/Server to Web
• And now Web to Mobile

Think about this: each of these changes has led to reinforced capabilities for corporations to implement new, more efficient processes. These new technologies give enterprises more means to - on the one hand - offer better services to their employees and - from the other hand - reduce costs, optimise administrative overheads and automate low added value tasks. In other words, I’m willing to bet high stakes that mobile will lead to more control of travel policy. It creates new means to further manage and control the supply chain by eliminating the productivity black hole that existed between leaving the office and returning: the trip.

Before, you had periods of inactivity during travel where nothing productive could be done. The process was always the same: you book before you leave; you fill expense reports when you get back (and it’s interesting to mention that, for historical reasons, it’s not uncommon to see these two parts entirely disconnected). Between the two, however: nothing. The good news is that we are shedding light on this black hole, and we can fill the last missing gap towards building the perfect travel program and solutions range. This works well for everyone: the life of employees can get better and enterprises can make sure they optimise T&E costs while insuring security of their staff.

So where does the confusion come from? There are two large zones of misunderstanding.

We  develop many mobile services on many platforms. There is one thing you quickly learn: of course building apps that are appealing to end users requires a lot of effort, and of course their beauty and ease of use is paramount. However, the largest amount of development time is spent working on the back end. The hardest part is making data and services available in such a way that you are able to efficiently invoke or access them from the mobile software. What does it say?  The battlefield is located in how good you are at creating data and services. They are the blood which makes mobile apps not only useful,  but possible in the first place. Without them, apps would be like white Venetian masks instead of faces of a living animal.

In other words, the challenge is the same as ever: deliver to our users the information and action levers they need. We’re seeing that companies are seeking the solutions which will enable them to get and manage this data more than ever – that’s something I’ll come back to in another blog post. It’s a trend that’s set to continue, and the good news is that we now have new means to make it happen in an even more seamless way. The feedback loop - getting real time information and instantly returning value - is now in motion 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Now for the second misconception. There are an endless list of tools and applications allowing you to find your way, convert currencies, quickly know if a flight is late, map airports, know the weather forecast, find restaurants, share opinions on hotels, access electronic boarding passes, etc. You “tweet”, you “Foursquare”, you relax with some “Angry Birds”. It’s up to companies to decide if they are willing to grant users total freedom on their smartphones or to publish a list a list of authorised applications. I’ve no strong opinion on what’s best. After all, most corporations don’t give employees the right to install whatever they want on their PCs either - in fact quite the opposite, you are often prevented from installing any software, and nobody is shocked by this. The smart phone is a corporate device like any other one and no law states that suddenly we should view it as “totalitarian” to restrict individual freedom with regards to the usage of such devices.

That’s not the point I want to make. There are side services - say the terminal nerves which each convey some remains of the nervous influx – and then there is the core set of processes, acting like the spine. The spine is composed of what goes from booking to expense reporting and feeding the financial systems, while enforcing corporate policies and means of controlling the T&E spend. The spine is not going to be grown by assembling a set of random applications available on the Apple store. As before the solutions will be provided by players who know how to manage this large area of corporate expenditure in a consistent manner. They might be incumbent software suppliers adding  and integrating mobile services to their existing offer and embracing the technological disruption, or it might be the opportunity for new comers to propose different solutions and/or architectures.

The myriad of tools mentioned above will exist too and it goes without saying that nobody will be able to single-handedly deliver everything travelers need or want. That’s where interoperability and making your system a platform  - as the now famous Googler explains so well - plays a major role in bolting everything together. But as much as you can add many pieces and options to a car, it’s always got to have an engine.

I can see a possible objection. It’s not that easy to draw a line between a core and an ancillary service. Where do you define the limit between what is a vertebrae of the spine and what is not?  The most obvious example of this blurring frontier is: what about the last minute offers for flights or hotels you are now able to get in real time? The goal is not to have normative answers or to display a cartographic mapping of the world which reflects our own conceptions of who should supply what. You can allow last minute opportunities to be seized or not (as you could before by the way; spot deals existed before smart phones). The degree of flexibility offered by a corporation’s travel policy varies. If you allow last minute offers, you will probably want them to fit certain criteria of acceptability and you will for sure seek to track and measure the data.

Company travel policies will continue and in fact be reinforced by the deepening of the connection between all stakeholders. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.