Mr. Waddell

Guest Service / Customer Experience Mgmt

Guest Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)

By Michael Waddell, Managing Director, INTEGRITYOne Partners

Put yourself in your guest's shoes. You enter the lobby, approach the front desk, and state your reason for being there (you're checking in, requesting an early room cleaning, etc.). The staff member behind the desk acknowledges your request and immediately begins working on a computer terminal to address it. You, the guest, are not the least bit surprised that information technology (IT) is used to support guest service. Yet many hospitality companies insist on segregating their guest service and other business functions from their information technology initiatives. Any disconnect between a hotel's technology and its business processes is likely to create a gap between the level of guest service intended and the level actually provided.

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a popular concept in IT today, and with good reason. The paradigm of SOA enables the intersection of technology and business processes: to ensure that IT directly supports the business's most vital functions. In the world of hospitality, this means connecting IT to guest service. We call it Guest Service-Oriented Architecture.

SOA and the Hospitality Business

In general, the landscape of IT and business is rapidly changing, and it's no different in the hospitality business. SOA is providing hospitality and other businesses with a conduit for exposing existing beneficial business processes and enabling rapid reuse of existing business services that can share IT infrastructure. For example, guest identification data must be collected, stored, and processed similarly whether the guest is requesting a sleeping room, coordinating a banquet event, scheduling a tee time, or arranging for spa services.

SOA is a conscious effort to develop reusable components that represent discrete business functions. These components are considered "services," which can be used with other services to make new complex business processes. So a guest identification service can be used by the front desk, but also by the banquet sales office, the golf course, and the spa manager.

This is a major shift in mindset from typical IT development projects because service development requires the development teams to consider future customers as well as existing customers. No longer is it acceptable to create "stovepipe" applications. Rather, service exposure should be considered during design to enable future growth to unknown processes and consumers.

It may sound highly theoretical, but the practicality follows. If done properly, SOA can expose enterprise benefits that would have never been considered realistic, but that can deliver benefits across the hospitality business. SOA gives hospitality companies the opportunity to access critical business information and share that information with the appropriate individuals to deliver overall benefits to the enterprise.

The Practicality of SOA

SOA allows for an existing business process or a new process to be made available in a generic manner. A business process could be something as simple as "check credit card limit." In today's hospitality market that same process is used in several systems: restaurant point-of-sale (POS), hotel front desk and reservations, and more. In many cases the same "check credit card limit" code was written each time it was implemented. The reason the code is specific in each case is because the systems are different. They all use different hardware and different software that was written by different suppliers.

SOA isolates the business process and turns it into a generic message that accepts a string of data. Strings are a lowest common denominator for many systems and development languages for communication. By using XML or some other string format, the system developer is assured that any other system that needs this type of function can get to it.

This example risks over-simplification and does not truly show the potential of SOA. So consider familiar (and arguably more complex) processes such as Reservations, Rewards, Amenities, or Customer Relationship Management (CRM). The first three business processes carry benefits for the guest, while CRM is more organization-specific. Let's begin by looking at SOA's potential impact on Reservations.

A Reservations Example

Systems that enable Reservations are readily available today. Unfortunately, the reservation system is often the only place where a reservation can be made. Suppose, for example, that a phone vendor makes a new allowance for reservations being made over a toll-free phone line. The hotel manager would contact the IT manager and find out if a new interface could be created to enable reservations to be made over the phone. The cost would be high, the implementation fragile.

This is where SOA shows its strength. Instead of making a new interface into the reservation system via a fragile implementation, SOA creates a service of the existing process of booking a reservation. This design shift has two powerful effects. First, it makes the system available to any type of end-user device. Second, and more important, it makes the business process now available to future business processes. The service is now available in a generic format and any future system that is created can also benefit from its generic design. To define this in more detail, let's look at services outside the realm of reservations.

To the Next Level

Assume a service has been created to make a reservation. Additionally, services have been created to encompass the activity of rewards memberships, resort amenities, and Customer Relationship Management. Now that these four major components are defined as services, a new larger service can be created called Integrated Customer Business Process (ICBP). This is a theoretical business process that assumes while making a reservation a customer may also want to review and utilize reward points and/or book a tee-time at the resort, while the organization wants to track this activity in the CRM system for marketing purposes. This would be a Herculean effort with the current system design because each system is a "Silo" and a project to make this one new process "ICBP" would be prohibitively expensive.

Because this system is based on SOA, however, all the services are available to any device and any internal system. So adding a new business process based on the same generic service is efficient and cost-effective.

The Nitty Gritty

Business benefits defined, let's also consider the implementation of the technology (a business cost). The five primary components required for service development are Data Access, Transformation, Auditing, Security, and Service End-Point. It may be possible to create services by utilizing an existing service end point but this is only available if the existing end point is available via XML. If the existing end-point requires proprietary Application Program Interfaces (APIs) to access the business function then it would not be considered a true service because it would only operate with those APIs. This is why the term "wrapper of existing services" is used in technical discussions. APIs would be wrapped with SOA techniques and provide a generic interface to other APIs via XML. It is important to include all five components while developing SOA. Key attributes of these components include:

In the example above, this approach would be used for each of the defined business processes. After the four business processes have been appropriately wrapped, end-points to each service would be available to create a compound business process. This is typically referred to as Service Orchestration, the term used to define the process of utilizing existing services to make new services. When an enterprise arrives at this point of service, implementing the use of third-party tools becomes important.

During the early stages of SOA implementation, tools such as Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), and Business Process Management (BPM) are premature because the enterprise does not have enough services to warrant the cost and or use of such robust tools. However; as the SOA model matures for the enterprise, these tools become necessary because the number of services become too unwieldy for manual management.

Summary

In conclusion, SOA is a new method of solving an old problem: How can business reuse systems development efforts and infrastructure? By creating a strategy of developing granular services around key business processes, an organization can quickly adapt to a change in market conditions. The future of SOA is wide open; there are many forces that are pushing self-awareness of services. This will enable services to reuse other services in an artificial-intelligent manner. Real-time information will be available for key business functionality, which will significantly change the competitive landscape.

In the world of hospitality, this means guests have the ability to more easily interact with hotel representatives, and managers have key information readily available, thereby shortening decision cycles and minimizing the time it takes to address a guest's request.

Giving guests what they want is fundamental to hospitality. Doing it faster than the competition is a strategy for success. Guest Service-Oriented Architecture can help bring that strategy to life by better integrating your property's IT systems with its guest service processes.

Michael Waddell, a Managing Partner with INTEGRITYOne Partners, has more than 20 years experience in business, technology, and the Hospitality & Leisure industry. Mr. Waddell's technology background along with his familiarity with and affinity for hospitality allow him to conceive unprecedented solutions for critical hospitality business issues. He leads the firm's efforts to develop tools that bridge costly disconnections between technology and operations. Mr. Waddell can be contacted at michael.waddell@ionep.com Extended Bio...

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