How travel firms can benefit from Lean IT with clever, low-cost innovations

Travel firms adopting lean can cut out waste in IT, and lower the costs of IT purchase and ownership in addition to achieving this variety.

How then does Lean IT help a travel company rapidly bring innovations to market? How can a travel company quickly introduce new apps, or create mobile hardware and software, or adopt a more localised approach to demand management in hardware and software? The answer lies in how the travel company manages its IT.

To follow the principles of Lean IT, a travel company must:

•    Make effective improvements, basing all decisions on objective data

•    Spend time on truly understanding the root conditions of problems

•    Give power to the workers who actually execute IT processes, so that they can optimise them without having to consult the hierarchy

•    Proactively interpret customer data so as to improve customer value

•    Make targets and management objectives reflect the customer’s purpose, not the organisation’s prejudices

Fully applied, these principles lead to a style of governance and management of IT very different from those traditionally found in the mainframe-based IT shops that typified past decades.

To understand lean strategies in IT today, however, travel professionals need to know about the origins of lean management practice in manufacturing, and the spread of lean principles to the world of services.

For more insights on the principals of lean IT and how they can benefit the travel industry – download a free copy of our Cleared for take-off paper.