The travel industry is stuck in silos and an “old way of thinking about IT”, with disparate systems that don’t talk to each other while the world moves on.

Or so says Amazon Web Services.

And although its bid might be to get everyone to move to its cloud platform, the company has a point.

Thomas Blood, enterprise strategist for EMEA at AWS, points to the “new world of IT” where employees traveling the world can access company systems remotely, where social media feeds marketing and Internet of Things-connected devices collect metrics and data constantly.

And, let’s not forget customer expectations of enhanced, easy experiences.

Blood says: “There’s a growing number of needs. Customers are expecting a much better experience, driven by the past 10 years of user interaction design. You look at the applications they are using, if they’re not smooth they’ll go find another on. They want to have a personalized experience.

“You need data that helps you build those applications and there’s more and more things coming at you in terms of innovation, new ideas, new technology, new business models and this requires speed. You have to innovate at speed.”

He was speaking at last week’s Amadeus Airline Executive Summit in Istanbul. He adds that it’s no longer sufficient to make small incremental changes over time and what’s needed is “dramatic improvements as quickly as possible.”

Step aside

Blood goes on to talk about measuring innovation and the right metric to use.

“The key is that when you focus on innovation, it’s really not about adding innovation. You have people in your organization who are innovative, you have ideas. Your customers want you to go faster so the trick is getting out of the way of all those ideas.”

The metric to use is time to value whereby companies measure the time it takes to go from an idea to create something that drives value to customers.

It sounds like a simple metric but, as Blood points out, it’s not one that is easy to get to within companies or working within traditional IT.

“Today what we’re really looking for is to drive this time to value metric in days or perhaps even in minutes. Imagine if your product teams could create new features and try them out in minutes.”

He talks of simply testing ideas rather than first building a case for trying something.

“It’s how science works. This is how we can also work,” he explains.

Blood also talks of some of the bad habits we have accumulated and how we “unlearn” those that are not longer relevant.

“For decades we have been working with project management principles. We measure success by whether we hit a date, whether we hit on budget and on spec. We’re not really consistently looking at customer value and business value as a metric. 

“One way to think about it differently is to think in terms of product rather than project.”

And, scale is important too in terms of building prototypes that might not be perfect and then modifying and adding to them.

“You can go from months of work, many components and fragile, inter-related and difficult to work with systems to hours of work, reusable standardized components that you integrate in myriads of ways.”

Conscious uncoupling

All good in theory but what about the reality of airlines, and other travel companies, complex processes, legacy systems and safety regulations?

Rashesh Jethi, senior vice president of engineering for the Americas and head of innovation for Amadeus, says that although airlines don’t traditionally develop in this rapid way, there’s no reason they can’t.

He says: “We think about the airline as having two layers. The physical layer and the digital layer which is everything that  supports it and that should be ripe for rapid innovation. 

“The two have been intertwined for many years so to innovate in technology it’s hard to separate the operational side and that has caused challenges – safety, privacy, local regulations etc.”

Blood points to Qantas which is employing this kind of thinking and architecture for its route planning. The technology calculates possible paths on a route and brings in all the available data such as weather with the aim of reducing costs on those flights.

Additional examples in travel include TUI. According to Blood, the tour operating giant no longer wants to run data centers, and is moving to AWS and training its engineers on cloud native architectures. 

“They’ve already migrated their selling platform onto the cloud so can now accelerate improvements on the system.

“Other customers including Expedia, Ryanair and Korean Air are all doing this for the same reasons – time to market, better customer experience, better resilience and cost saving.”

* This reporter’s attendance at the event was supported by Amadeus.