Technology Supporting Business: Thinking Tourism Futures

Tourism Futures is on again this week. The conference is an annual gathering of travel industry planners, marketers and executives’ from around Australia and New Zealand and I’ve become a regular attendee at the day long Technology Futures sessions. I always find these sorts of events energizing, thought provoking and inspiring: lubricating my thinking and creativity in a way that is so hard to do unless you drag yourself out of the office and away from the everyday.

Last year I was honored to be invited to speak at the event and as I sit here preparing for this years conference, I find myself pondering that presentation. The title “Technology Supporting Business” captured nicely the two key messages in my presentation, concepts which I’m very passionate about:
1) The need for constant alignment of technology with business areas’ needs and;
2) to keep focus on the basics so that business can be both supported and enabled by technology.

Too many companies think of technology as a silver bullet (and yes, an alarming number of executives view it as a mere ‘cost centre’ or ‘drain’ on their core business). All technology should support their business’ goals, not its own ends. Too many people forget that technology is a tool, not an end in itself. I have been involved a lot of different IT and travel technology projects and have had the opportunity to see first hand what separates those that work and those that fail. While it would have taken a whole lot more than 40 minutes to [even] list all of the reasons for the various successes and failures, the message is that technology is not the solution if it is not implemented or managed well.

Business Alignment is critical to success. Aligning the technology to business is like aligning marketing goals to company goals or aligning a telescope to the sky. I argued last year (I still do if you get me talking) that senior management and business buy-in to technology projects is critical and that when business teams sponsor projects, they need to actively participate, not just leave it to the IT team. You would not try to drive a Winnebago down the freeway while making coffee, would you? In fact, when I was asked to give the same presentation to the International Project Management Institute’s Queensland Chapter, in October last year this was the topic that got the greatest response.

Conversely, if you are implementing or managing (or a business leader driving) an IT project, you need to consider the other side of the coin too: Technology needs to be part of a technology strategy and “IT Architecture”. Like building a house, there are certain foundations [that should be] in place and if you are extending your house, you need to work with these foundations. Extend on them by all means, but if you try to ignore the foundations you risk having the old and the new parts of your house move independently of each other causing all sorts of chaos.

So I’m looking forward to taking away a fistful of new ideas from the presentations at Tourism Futures: Tourism Online sessions. I’m just as excited to take these new ideas and successfully implement them,to the benefit of all my stakeholders.