Travel Industry Disruption by Force 5 Tornado

Travel industry has history of IT innovation disruption and now digital video is disrupting the marketing of destinations in the tourism industry:

• First, the global distribution system changes airlines reservations
• Then disruption via Internet disintermediation of travel agent in 1990s
• Now DMAI Futures Study cites destination marketing organization disruption via “Googling”

This use case describes a destination marketing industry scenario that illustrates how the ecosystem hub implementation road map can be employed for evaluating business agility readiness. The example used is for the Sonoma County Tourism (SCT) Ecosystem, as depicted in the keystone scenario shown in Figure E.4 for food and wine events, with a concept of operation for the “to-be” SOE as deployed in a future Sneakaway campaign.

This Epilogue outlines the keystone scenario assessment of business agility readiness for the SCT Sneakaway campaign. This use case features an overview of the development of the ecosystem hub via the cloud-based Simpleview Social CRM Partner Extranet to describe in more detail how the SCT Ecosystem leverages the Force 5 Tornado technologies to create the business agility needed to gain and sustain their competitive advantage as the leading wine country destination in the USA.

Destination Marketing Industry Trends.

A comprehensive study of the state of the industry was completed by the Destination Marketing Association International (DMAI) in 2008. The core findings were published in the report “The Future of Destination Marketing: Tradition, Transition, and Transformation.” According to the objectives of this “Future” study, it has been used to provide a framework and guidance for destination marketing organizations (DMOs) to conduct scenario-based strategic planning exercises in order to better navigate these turbulent economic times.

Strategic Conclusions

Two significant conclusions may be drawn from the study that directly impact a DMO's ability to sustain a competitive advantage as the voice of the customer within the larger travel and tourism industry. This voice is expressed in terms of the three strategic themes—relevance, value proposition, and visibility—that are reflected in the DMO strategic conversation. It refers to both the internal customer (the destination ecosystem stakeholders) and the external customer (the destination location visitors). The resulting conclusions are summarized as:

• DMOs collaborate with their stakeholders as a virtual enterprise.
• Information technology is an enabler to improve enterprise performance.

These conclusions form the basis of a visitor-centric strategy for a collaborative commerce solution that increases the effectiveness of integrated destination marketing campaigns. Such campaigns need to be targeted to attract inbound destination visitors during their travel planning and also to support at-destination visitors during their stay.

Collaborative commerce (c-commerce) is a strategy for mainstream electronic business (e-business) evolution. C-commerce business practices enable trading partners to create, manage, and use data in a shared environment to design, build, and support products throughout their life cycles, working separately to leverage their core competencies together in a value chain that forms a virtual enterprise (Heisterberg 2003). This definition of c-commerce is made actionable by blending the elements of operations management, performance management, and information technology in order to realize virtual enterprise integration.

Note that value chain refers to the trading partner community with mutually beneficial interests spanning the complete business ecosystem of destinational stakeholders. As a virtual enterprise, this ecosystem operates as a strategic alliance of organizations that collaborate to share core competencies and resources in a manner that improves their ability to do business. Ecosystem synergy is achieved by means of virtual enterprise integration. This enables stakeholders to perform more effectively as a collective whole through their use of information technology and collaborative business practices.

Ecosystem Hub Platforms

The hallmark of a c-commerce ecosystem is a network of ecosystem hubs, based on a service-oriented architecture (SOA), which are e-business platforms that facilitate the sharing of information between trading partners. They utilize Web 2.0 technologies and, in general, are deployed as either a private trading exchange operating as a hybrid cloud with integrated private and community cloud platforms, such as the password-protected members-only partition of a DMO website for stakeholders, or a public e-marketplace, such as a commercial travel portal operated in the travel, tourism, and hospitality industry providing travel planning and/or online travel agency services.

As illustrated in Figure E.1, core platform data management services, based on an SOA embracing open source software concepts, are hosted on a web server with firewalls and secure tunneling capable of handling public key encryption transactions. Layered web services extend outward to support the following generic ecosystem hub functions: directory and middleware, including interoperable data management services for enterprise content management, project portfolio management, and business process management; generic business collaboration tools and messaging services; trading partner profile and catalog services to facilitate virtual enterprise partnering; and customizable vertical industry specific tools and application services.

As a general business trend, c-commerce strategies are being built around distinct value chain management business models, which facilitate mass customization scenarios via demand chain integration and mass production scenarios via supply chain integration in most industries today. Both types of value chain scenarios are being enabled by software-as-a-service (SaaS) application deployment. As c-commerce evolves as the mainstream e-business strategy for effective value chain management, reengineering of management decision-making processes becomes the critical success factor for enterprise profitability and growth in the twenty-first century.

Destination Marketing Organization Leadership Roles and Responsibilities

Destination marketing organizations (DMOs) may operate a central ecosystem hub, serving as the travel business ecosystem leader, in the virtual enterprise associated with delivery of travel and hospitality services to visitors in a destination location. This strategic positioning of a DMO is articulated in terms of fulfilling four key roles from a visitor-centric strategy for destination stakeholders (DMAIF 2008):

1. Informing, educating, and advising the visitor. The DMO's key contribution in this dimension is message integrity—serving as the official face and voice of the destination.
2. Advising and supporting marketers. The DMO's key contribution in this dimension is matchmaking—finding or creating opportunities for those who buy and sell visitor-related services to do business with one another.
3. Advocating the total visitor experience. The DMO's key contribution in this dimension is visitor focus—drawing the attention of all stakeholders to the challenge of delivering a high-value visitor experience from end to end, start to finish.
4. Supporting destination development. The DMO's key contribution in this dimension is strategic perspective—advocating a master-planned approach to development that recognizes the value of the visitor industry, and providing policy leadership for key developments and initiatives.

Savvy DMOs are using interactive marketing practices as travel content aggregators by leveraging this leadership position to become the central destination information hub for travelers making trip-planning decisions. This strategy is supported from the perspective of several of the “Future” study super-trends—The Battle for Attention, Smart and Friendly Websites, The Electronic Culture, and The Quest for Relevance—and visibility is arguably one of the fundamental critical success factors for DMOs:

Before our prospective visitors actually travel physically, they typically travel “virtually.” They undertake a journey of knowledge, however brief or extensive, that enables them to make a whole range of choices about what to buy and how. This journey of knowledge might meander down any number of pathways, including talking with friends, reading news articles and travel guides, watching TV shows, and—more commonly these days—exploring what the Internet has to offer. (DMAIF 2008)

Creating a strategic concept for a virtual visitor information center (vVIC) architecture is an actionable means to achieve the ends expressed in the context of the “Future” study. The term virtual has a dual meaning in the definition of a vVIC. First, although it may exist as a bricks-and-mortar facility, a vVIC is more importantly a facility that exists in cyberspace and can be accessed from anywhere in the world. Second, the vVIC uses digital media to provide visitors with a rich, high-fidelity experience of the destination location, venues, and activities before, during, and after their trip. Furthermore, it is important to recognize that a vVIC is both a technology platform and an advertising content library featuring rich Internet applications (Heisterberg 2009).

Development of a vVIC requires that a DMO establish integrated policies, practices, and processes for coordinated acquisition of technology and content. Operation of a vVIC can be used to create a visitor experience that differentiates from commercial travel planning portals. Such a visitor experience, created with compelling content and delivered throughout the travel life cycle, can provide a DMO with a sustainable competitive advantage that is aligned with its enterprise business strategy. This may be accomplished using the three strategic themes, the four roles of a strategic map, and the five key results areas to provide the framework for DMO strategic planning of a c-commerce solution for improved destination marketing. In order to provide a more actionable description of the strategic architecture for a vVIC, Sonoma County Tourism (SCT) is an example of a representative DMO.

DMO Challenges and Opportunities

The past decade has seen the growth of the Internet dominate the technology market space across all industries, and e-business has become mainstream business. With this phenomenon has come a proliferation of the enterprise information portal (EIP), which is a commercial software product that serves as an ecosystem hub platform to support targeted users in a community of interest that represents an ecosystem for common business or leisure activities (Heisterberg 2001).

An EIP provides access to relevant structured transactional information, aggregated business intelligence data and trends, unstructured documents and content sources, digital media, and web services. Such an ecosystem hub offers members interaction with rich Internet applications—integrated graphics, animation, audio, video, and collaborative processes for personalized communications between enterprise trading partners.

In the travel and tourism industry, such websites serve as content aggregators and navigation guides to the Internet—aimed at travel customers. Quite apart from the interactive sites of the travel resellers, more and more hotels, visitor attractions, city governments, city-centered magazines, travel publishers, hotel rating agencies, and a host of other specialized sites are siphoning off visitor attention that might otherwise go to DMOs. Becoming a preferred “infomediary”—the go-to source that's positioned as far up the road as possible in the customer's journey of knowledge—will increasingly define competitive advantage in many sectors of business (DMAIF 2008).

Travel Life Cycle Management Scenarios

Primary and secondary research conducted by Rod Heisterberg Associates for a travel and tourism technology client during 2007 and 2008 resulted in the documentation of the travel customer decision journey as a generic travel life cycle model. It describes visitor decision making associated with behavior for the planning, coordination, and management of the travel itinerary. The life cycle model is applicable to convention/meeting, travel trade, and leisure travel scenarios. The development of this model, which drives a series of visitor experience use cases, continued throughout 2009.

The following use case definitions are provided in the context of development and operation of a vVIC using ecosystem hub architecture with Web 2.0 product features and functions. The required enabling technologies for a vVIC can be expressed as a set of fully developed use cases. These system requirements incorporate Web 2.0 functionality, including user-generated content (UGC)—reviews, ratings, photos, and videos; blogs, wikis, and really simple syndication (RSS) feeds, as well as rich Internet applications. Expert concierge services that build and manage the travel itinerary are also described in the use cases.

Visitor experience management principles and practices, shown in Figure E.2, are leveraged to build the vVIC with the Web 2.0 capabilities that facilitate operating as a virtual focus group for evaluating collaborative destination marketing strategies and tactics across the travel life cycle. This includes providing visitor services for UGC uploads of photos and videos plus reviews and ratings of itinerary activities. Visitors can use the vVIC blogs and wikis to create travel life cycle itinerary management resources and tools. The vVIC-provided collaboration spaces for registered community members can facilitate development of:

• Coordination of the organization for a group travel activity
• Destination insider travel guides and neighborhood tours
• Personalized vacation journals and trip albums
• Seasonal or special event tips or frequently asked questions

The vVIC services may be employed to privately share such resources with friends and family or to publicly publish them for like-minded travelers. This will enhance visitor experience before, during, and after the trip. Accordingly, the community knowledge associated with the destination becomes an explicit marketing asset, as well as generating increasing website online stickiness that is of value to the whole ecosystem.

The travel life cycle is intended to provide the foundation of a vVIC architectural concept for building a collaborative travel planning community as a social media network. This system architecture may be described in terms of the hardware, software, and Internet resources needed for implementing the distributed multiplatform portal as an ecosystem hub for a DMO ecosystem. It is recommended that development be performed in accordance with a DMO technology plan describing an iterative incremental implementation strategy expressed as a multiyear vVIC road map. Use scenarios are defined in eight steps as follows (Heisterberg 2008):

1. Decide Travel: Explore destination galleries to decide desired travel location.

   View SCT videos and other rich media on digital cable TV video on demand (VOD), and as streaming videos on commercial travel planning portals, or from vVIC to traveler devices, as appropriate based on platform capabilities and interactive digital advertising campaign objectives.

2. Decide Destination: Explore the destination gallery of the desired location for featured travel.

   View SCT attractions, hotels, restaurants, shopping, recreation, and other promotional videos and rich media on VOD, travel planning portals, or vVIC.

3. Decide Itinerary: View destination location travel guide for to-do list.

   View SCT venue videos (i.e., attractions, hotels, restaurants, shopping, recreation, etc.) and rich media on VOD, travel planning portals, or vVIC.

4. Decide Booking: Make travel reservations:
   1. Round-trip transportation
   2. Lodging
   3. Ground transportation
   4. Tours

   Use rich Internet applications on vVIC and affiliate partner network for in-depth research on options in accordance with personal traveler profile and expert concierge services in booking itinerary activities.

5. Decide Plans: Search travel tips library for trip issues and How2 interests.

   Build itinerary via rich Internet applications for viewing general trip and specific SCT How2 videos on vVIC.

6. Decide Update: Check travel guide when at destination hotel for itinerary update.

   View SCT venue videos on vVIC and interact with expert concierge via rich Internet applications to manage itinerary.

7. Decide Change: Check travel guide when on the move for itinerary change.

   Review SCT videos and interact with expert concierge via rich Internet applications for itinerary changes on vVIC.

8. Decide Sharing: Post travel guide feedback and UGC photos and/or videos on return home.

   Upload UGC to SCT travel guide space to share with members of registered community on vVIC.

Note that since a vVIC is both a technology platform and an advertising content library featuring rich media and rich Internet applications, content acquisition policies and practices need to be established in a modular manner so that they are aligned with the DMO marketing strategy, as well as keyed to the effectiveness of the associated digital media. Furthermore, content management processes and enabling systems must be implemented in an incremental manner in accordance with a comprehensive business case for development and operation of a vVIC that is integrated with interactive advertising campaign management systems. For example, content needs to be produced by the DMO ecosystem or sourced from digital media providers for destination galleries, travel guides, and travel tips as collections of rich Internet applications, which include:

• Integrated graphics, including interactive maps
• Animated graphics such as virtual reality scenes
• Audio files (i.e., MP3 for podcast guided tours)
• Video assets (i.e., prepurposed for multiplatform display)
• Collaborative processes for interactive synchronous and asynchronous communications between groups of visitors

They can be published for multiplatform display via VOD, web, and mobile devices. Rich media sourcing, publication, and placement priority is given to professionally produced video assets that tell a compelling story about “Why the destination is a great place to visit!” and that show “All the great things to do when you visit the destination!”

These professional video assets can also be syndicated on commercial travel planning portals as part of an affiliate marketing campaign that is targeted to the visitor experience context or behavioral interaction according to the travel life cycle. In such a manner, this video and rich media content can be produced once and published many times across the travel life cycle on multiple VOD, web, and mobile vVIC platforms for integrated to-destination and in-destination campaigns that are cooperatively funded.

Visitor Information Center as a Differentiator

So how can a DMO compete with travel planning portals that employ multimillion-dollar brand and product marketing campaigns to generate hundreds of millions of Internet visitors a year? Development of a vVIC can provide a DMO with a sustainable competitive advantage that is aligned with a collaborative marketing strategy for attracting prospective travelers.

This must be done as early as possible in the DMO's virtual customer decision journeys to find trustworthy destination information in order to develop the reputation as the preferred first stop in the travel-planning life cycle. Furthermore, this trusted insider relationship needs to be cultivated throughout the visitor's trip. The key is establishing the vVIC, via use of intelligent itinerary management tools and services, as the primary destination information hub before, during, and after the visitor's trip. This is enabled by interactive marketing technology for reusing the collection of rich Internet media and applications across all platforms that visitors employ in the scenarios of their travel life cycle experience.

Insights to the strategic concept of vVIC operations may be gained by reviewing a state-of-the-art visitor information center, as well as evaluating best practices for in-destination and to-destination marketing campaigns.

DMO Alternative: Distributed Virtual Center Concept

The strategic concept for a vVIC is described and being developed in the context as a generalized architecture suitable for implementation in accordance with the specification of a DMO's needs. DMOs can create a virtual tourism ecosystem by interconnecting stakeholder websites to form a coordinated service value network enabled by c-commerce technologies. As a leader of the business ecosystem, a DMO can both directly participate in as well as promote the value propositions of stakeholders in an economic community that is chartered with the mission to grow the business and leisure travel trade for the benefit of a regional location. This economic community produces travel and hospitality services of value to visitors throughout the region. Other regional DMOs, such as local chambers of commerce and convention and visitor bureaus (CVBs), may also be stakeholders in the greater DMO ecosystem.

The virtual enterprise of community members may evolve their ecosystem roles and responsibilities, as well as their capabilities and core competencies. In such a manner they will be dynamically aligned with one or more value chains operating in the ecosystem. Note that the role of the DMO as ecosystem leader is valued by the travel community because it enables business members to align their marketing operations with a collaborative destinational strategy.

The DMO ecosystems, illustrated in Figure E.3 and Figure E.4, are nested – with the SCT business ecosystem also shown as a regional DMO partner, being a member of the larger San Francisco Travel business ecosystem. Each ecosystem consists of two distinct networks with interdependent virtual enterprises cooperating to produce and deliver travel products that are of value to their mutual target customers, the destination visitors. The ecosystem service value networks operate as collaborative marketing campaign value chains. These networks provide travel services to promote to-destination visitor traffic into the destination location and to provide in-destination hospitality and tourism services to visitors during their stay. DMO community members include:

• Convention and visitor bureau organizations
• Travel planning and booking websites
• Travel agents
• Tour wholesalers
• Tour operators
• Tour managers
• Resorts
• Cruise lines
• Vacation properties
• Airlines
• Rental cars
• Merchandisers
• Attractions
• Hotels
• Restaurants
• Shopping
• Recreation
• Travel service affiliates

This collection of stakeholders will gain value by actively participating in the vVIC and engaging in a collaborative DMO strategy for cooperative marketing projects promoting integrated to-destination and in-destination digital advertising campaigns.

The process of creating a strategic vision for a vVIC concept of operation is governed by three design principles: modularity, scalability, and incremental implementation. The concept of operation for a vVIC using the SCT as an example builds on technology transfer opportunities from the state-of-the-art virtual enterprise best practices.

Virtual Visitor Information Center Solution

The ecosystem hub architecture provides the fundamental e-business platform to facilitate integrated to-destination and in-destination advertising value chain scenarios for the vVIC. Deployment as SaaS-hosted applications of virtual enterprise data management services can reliably deliver the c-commerce solution via safeguarding DMO ecosystem proprietary information as part of a SaaS service-level agreement. With the vVIC operating as the interactive marketing hub, the SOA enables the virtual enterprise data management model via web services that provide a standards-based, secure, shared data environment for a collaborative marketing campaign optimization.

Ecosystem Hub Content Management Services

Content management is a fundamental capability required by an EIP as a system of record (SOR) when it is deployed as an ecosystem hub, regardless of the industry or functional application. The generic integration services enable EIPs to act as virtual enterprise gateways providing semantic interoperability with diverse applications across multiple DMO hybrid cloud platforms and commercial travel portals. In general, an ecosystem hub contains a profile of every registered virtual enterprise member, including a catalog of the member's products, capabilities, and capacities, as well as trading partner agreements and communication system preferences. This profile provides data directory and dictionary services that describe all the sharable information at the data element level that is owned by a trading partner, including a security policy to permit the sharing of information with a virtual enterprise customer, but not with a potential competitor.

EIPs are made into products according to various industry needs. In this manner, virtual enterprise data management services include data format and communication translations as required for messaging services according to the required industry standards. Collaboration tools can also be provided to support both asynchronous groupware and synchronous real-time, multipoint data conferencing applications for both structured and unstructured data. In addition, an ecosystem hub can offer product data exchange translation in accordance with the governing industry standards, as well as a library of application software for a vertical industry where native data format exchange is considered to be mission critical, such as the aerospace industry.

Recall from Figure E.1 that core platform services, based on an SOA embracing open source software concepts, are hosted on a web server with firewalls and secure tunneling capable of handling public key encryption transactions. Layered web services extend outward to support directory and middleware, including interoperable object management services for enterprise content, including digital assets, product data managed as project portfolios, and business process management via a work flow engine; generic business collaboration tools and messaging services; trading partner profile and catalog services to facilitate virtual enterprise partnering; and customizable vertical industry specific tools and application services.

The messaging services provide the enabling technology that is fundamental for decision making in a real-time enterprise. For example, in manufacturing industries, such c-commerce messaging data provides the status of stock on hand that is stored at enterprise and trading partner locations, as well as stock in transit across the value chain for inventory visibility. Furthermore, supply chain management business activity monitoring solutions generate event notifications associated with the business rules that reflect the roles and responsibilities of each trading partner. Finally, operational metrics, such as supplier delivery history and status, are displayed as real-time dashboards for measurement of trading partner performance in accordance with their service-level agreements to support integrated value chain management decision making.

An EIP deployment, using the variety of ecosystem hub sourcing strategies currently available, may be developed by the internal IT organization or outsourced to a trading partner with an IT core competency in order to allow the enterprise to focus on executing its strategic business plan. These integration services offer virtual enterprise gateways providing semantic interoperability with diverse applications.

As a core service for EIP products, content management systems have become a primary application for DMOs—particularly solutions that have been designed specifically with destination marketing needs and processes in mind, such as the Simpleview content management system (CMS) and CRM platforms as an Ecosystem Hub. They enable staff members with moderate computer expertise to publish content without requiring technical knowledge of HTML or the uploading of complex files. The responsibilities can be dispersed across several departments as needed. The ultimate result of using content management systems is dynamic websites that will increase the time visitors spend on a vVIC interacting with the DMO and ecosystem stakeholders.

In the travel industry, for example, an ecosystem hub using CRM as a vVIC platform must interoperate with several intranets as part of the DMO enterprise information management system and with numerous business ecosystem stakeholder extranets as CRMs across multiple travel industry segments. Furthermore, the vVIC must interoperate with several commercial travel portals as part of affiliate marketing scenarios.

In general, enterprises need to build or acquire access to networks outside their four walls that will interoperate as a blend of extranets that consist of hybrid cloud platforms, as well as both public vertical industry and horizontal e-marketplaces. These ecosystem hubs also provide business process outsourcing and information integration services. Leading examples such as Exostar, primarily serving the aerospace and defense industry, and E2open, providing supplier on-boarding for diverse business networks, including industrial high-tech electronics and consumer packaged goods, demonstrate the broad applicability of the use of Ecosystem Hubs for virtual enterprise integration.

There are numerous EIP vendors featuring Web 2.0 technologies for DMOs to select as ecosystem hub software providers for building a vVIC using the DMO ecosystem business case for vVIC development, as well as an iterative incremental implementation road map.

vVIC Architecture as an Ecosystem Hub

Operation of a central ecosystem hub as a hybrid cloud with integrated private and community cloud platforms by a DMO will facilitate an SOA-based infrastructure for the virtual enterprise enabled as a network of ecosystem hubs providing collaborative marketing campaign management services for their business ecosystem. Such information system architecture is both robust and scalable, as well as extensible to a wide variety of travel industry scenarios.

The example is provided in the context of the incremental implementation model for a road map in terms of vVIC extranet integration to develop c-commerce competencies by investing in a portfolio of IT initiatives. It is focused on a strategy for a DMO to implement hybrid cloud platforms using an ecosystem hub architecture, as shown in Figure E.4, for interactive marketing campaigns. The DMO vVIC is the mission-critical part of a network of ecosystem hubs for creating a virtual enterprise with collaborative travel planning community services as part of a business ecosystem (Heisterberg 2008).

Note that such interactive marketing applications of knowledge management for the travel demand chain scenarios are fundamental for collaborative marketing success. Deciding what information is relevant for a marketing segmentation strategy depends on what needs to be achieved. Information can be gathered either explicitly, based on information that the customer has provided, or implicitly, gathered without the customer's direct knowledge (Heisterberg 2010). This knowledge capture is facilitated by the SOA for social networking as layers of travel destination community services reflecting increasing levels of customer intimacy:

1. Public portal services—the outermost layer of the DMO interactive marketing platform that provides general visitor destination information and travel services, such as:
   1. Travel planning and sample itinerary information
   2. Travel and tourism product catalog as rich media assets (attractions, lodging, dining, shopping, recreation, etc.)
   3. Community events calendar
   4. Mobile app gateway or responsive design website support
2. Private community services—the middle layer where returning visitor registration is required to become a DMO community member eligible to receive personalized customer services via traditional customer relationship management (CRM) or contemporary customer experience management (CEM) systems functionality, such as:
   1. Travel planning tools, including expert concierge itinerary builder
   2. Merchandising via e-commerce and booking engine services
   3. Rich media for social networking
   4. RSS feed for blogs and podcasts
   5. UGC functionality
3. Proprietary member services—the innermost layer is reserved for ecosystem stakeholders, as well as where VIP visitor entrée is provided to a customized travel itinerary management work space as a gated community on a subscription or fee-for-service basis:
   1. Expert concierge premium VIP membership
   2. Stakeholder membership partition with password-protected login
   3. Stakeholder collaboration spaces with password-protected login
   4. Interactive marketing campaign management suite, including:
      1. Analytic tools
      2. Creative library
      3. Campaign ad unit performance dashboard

Since an ecosystem hub can provide a library of application software for a vertical industry, a vVIC can optimize the DMO ecosystem stakeholder collaboration in terms of economic impact via orchestrating integrated marketing campaigns by facilitating an interactive marketing campaign management system.

Such an online marketing suite, as defined by Forrester Research, consists of two key components, which describe the Ecosystem Hub architecture (Heisterberg 2010):

1. Central Hub—the core of the suite that enables marketers to manage and integrate online data as an ecosystem hub
2. Network—a thriving community of technology and service partners that delivers execution, targeting, and measurement services as a business ecosystem.

Four key architectural elements make the ecosystem hub the “design and decisioning engine of the online marketing suite”:

1. A unified data model
2. Process tools and metadata repository
3. A centralized optimization engine
4. Standards-based architecture

This concept of the “central hub” as the “novel part of the suite” corresponds to the definition of an ecosystem hub in terms of the generic data management services of the SOA shown in Figure E.1, as well as the application-specific core Web 2.0 architecture in Figure E.5, including the adaptive strategic planning decision support system (DSS) services driven by big data analytics (BDA). Furthermore, the interactive marketing specialist vendors that make up the network layer correspond to the marketing-specific “digital media ad campaign management services” representation of the generic “vertical industry applications libraries” layer of the ecosystem hub architecture. These interactive marketing tools may include:

• Web interaction optimization
• Behavioral targeting
• Multivariate testing
• E-mail campaigns
• Bid management
• Web analytics
• Ad serving

Developing and managing SOA-based business processes for marketing, advertising, sales, and customer support in aligned service value chains throughout the business ecosystem both require an architecture that provides a standards-based, secure, shared data environment. Such architecture for developing, monitoring, measuring, and optimizing SOA-enabled business processes in service networks may be exemplified as a suite of marketing campaign and performance management decision support system applications using Web 2.0 enabling technology to provide the functionality needed to implement c-commerce business models (Vittal, VanBoskirk, and Glass 2007):

Today interactive marketing is a fragmented discipline in which marketers work with many different vendors to develop and execute marketing programs. But as the number of channels and programs grow, this situation becomes untenable. Today's interactive marketers have few options as neither enterprise marketing suites nor interactive specialists address their needs. Forrester believes that the time is right for the online marketing suite to emerge.

Such interactive marketing solutions are now widely available and may be deployed as an ecosystem hub enabled by SOA technology using an EIP platform; this “is the eventual destiny for all online marketing technology and will enable a single view of the customer across channels, provide process tools to support collaboration, centralize optimization, and support a partner ecosystem.” The functional requirements for this marketing ecosystem hub may be summarized as: enable efficient and effective collaboration, provide reliable performance measurement, and optimize marketing spend.

Dynamic Itinerary Services for Travel Life Cycle Management

The key to the expert concierge strategic concept of c-commerce applications for interactive marketing in the travel industry is leveraging the knowledge management contained within the DMO business ecosystem. This is accomplished by using an inferencing engine to manage graphical interface artifacts and relationship conventions according to their experience profiles. DMO community members can manipulate trip map objects representing itinerary icons such as events, places, and reservations as appropriate to their community member privileges. They can create and maintain dynamic itineraries that span many scenarios for trips, destinations, time lines past, present, future; store and edit travel information; and access it for use anytime—anywhere in the world.

Expert concierge employs proprietary semantic Web 3.0 technology for automatically creating itineraries from travel documentation. It extracts the travel data for the trip being planned to create and maintain an itinerary master file for each trip stored in the visitor's personal travel space on a vVIC. The intelligent agents work transparently to aggregate all related travel data from trip-specific e-mails and travel planning portals, as well as other travel, tourism, and hospitality services, including:

• Travel schedule weather reports and forecasts
• Destination and tour maps with directions
• Location and event guides
• Transportation, lodging, and dining reservations
• Shopping lists and tips with recommended venues and deals
• Geo-synced rich media links for attractions and points of interest

Note that a vVIC supports standard web browsers, as well as mobile device interfaces using open source standards and responsive design principle, practices, and products to optimize diverse mobile platform functionality. According to the travel life cycle, the mobile capabilities may become the most valuable expert concierge services due to the portable and pervasive advantages of mobile computing. Beyond enabling DMO visitors to check their itinerary plans on the move, the expert system is capable of automatic or on-demand regeneration of itinerary recommendations when changes occur within the current trip-specific environment. This dynamic adaptation meets the expert concierge goal to most easily provide the most current travel information how, when, and where vVIC members want it.

Ecosystem Hub Via Simpleview Platform

Since 1991, the Simpleview vision has produced innovations in destination marketing for DMOs both large and small: the first company to create a web-based destination management system specifically to help DMOs manage relationships with industry partners and customer, as well as travelers; the first to integrate that system with an easy to use yet powerful web-based content management system; and also the first to extend that integrated CRM/CMS solution to sites optimized for mobile web.

The vision and mission for the social CRM platform in a DMO business ecosystem is described in Figure E.6 with highlights from the keynote presentation for the Simpleview Summit 2014 by CEO, Ryan George. He not only defines the digital business ecosystem hub solution value proposition in general, the partner extranet collaborative marketing campaign management use case benefits are specifically articulated to support the economic justification for virtual enterprise deployment. This strategic architecture is envisioned for the BAR CoE using the Ecosystem Hub via the cloud-based Simpleview CRM features summarized in Figure E.7. vVIC functionality is further delineated for Sneakaway campaigns with partner relationship management applications in the SCT ecosystem in Figure E.8. The bottom line is that the Simpleview platform enables successful execution of this Sonoma Sneakaway keystone scenario strategy and is a critical success factor for CIO-CMO alignment.

Collaborative Strategies for Cooperative Marketing

A c-commerce framework that facilitates the management of interactive marketing value chain system operations is presented to summarize the concept of adaptive strategic planning for demand chain optimization. An ecosystem hub architecture enabled by Web 2.0 services provides the foundation for a generic model of c-commerce applications for service value network management systems. This use case scenario is based on specific value propositions associated with deploying digital media ad campaign management applications in the travel and tourism industry.

The emerging term for this evolutionary approach is the strategic conversation. This is the ongoing “multilogue” around key issues, developments, trends, events, and possible options for coping with the rapidly changing business environment. In today's world, the strategic conversation must be almost continuous rather than annual; it must involve all functional areas and many levels of the organization; and it must incorporate the thinking of many contributors, not just the most senior leaders (DMAIF, 2008).

Collaborative marketing campaign management principles, practices, and processes have become mainstream in the travel, tourism, and hospitality industry. Such collaboration strategies leverage integrated marketing business processes enabled by SOA technology. The vVIC enables development of marketing plans for an interactive rich media advertising campaigns by stakeholders in the SCT business ecosystem that maximize economic impact by using collaborative marketing strategies for their inbound-destination and at-destination advertising campaigns. Using the vVIC as the ecosystem hub for a digital media ad content library facilitates collaborative DMO ecosystem campaigns that utilize:

• Multichannel campaign publication:
  1. Digital cable TV with addressable ad units, including VOD
  2. Internet ads on vVIC and affiliate marketing partner websites
  3. Pervasive content served to mobile smartphones and tablets
• Contextual and behavioral messaging keyed to visitor experience in accordance to the travel life cycle and expert concierge itinerary management services
• Platform touch points and messaging mix optimized to achieve stakeholder to-destination and in-destination advertising objectives

In summary, the vVIC enables optimization of the DMO visitor experience across the travel life cycle by facilitating management of the visitor communication and stakeholder collaboration processes. This results in the ability to leverage cooperative marketing campaigns for integrated to-destination and in-destination advertising to maximize economic impact for the DMO ecosystem.

Campaign Results

Summary of Sneakaway campaign results is contained in the following slide gallery, which depicts the broad range of business ecosystem value produced by Ecosystem Hub deployment.

Business Agility Readiness Road Map

Business agility, defined as innovation via collaboration to be able to anticipate challenges and opportunities before they occur, produces a sustainable competitive advantage. The business value of IT is realized by creating business agility using a strategy of innovation for CIO-CMO alignment around big data analytics based on collaborative marketing best practices. This is made actionable as a decision framework by incorporating a holistic customer-centric performance management system using an IT balanced scorecard as the basis for a Business Agility Readiness (BAR) Road Map.

The BAR Road Map is defined in terms of an enterprise architecture that consists of the following three elements, integrated by data:

• People → Business architecture
• Process → Application architecture
• Tools → Technology architecture

BAR is actionable by means of using a gap analysis methodology to measure the change in business value associated with each of the four elements as scored in terms of a customer-centric model of business agility. The model is defined by four customer moments of engagement dimensions: profile, engagement, life cycle, and conscience. As the enterprise architecture evolves from the “as-is” state of the current system of record (SOR) to the “to-be” state of the envisioned system of engagement (SOE) supported with multidimensional scoring (MDS), the business is transformed in terms of its competitive position in the business ecosystem. This conceptual process is reflected in elements of the SCT “Strategic Thought Process.”

The basis of the gap analysis is documented in the form of two social graphs reflecting both the current and the future states of the enterprise architecture. The social graph for the SOR is articulated by a concept of operation that describes how the product data is created, managed, and used by internal/external stakeholders in the context of their roles in the keystone use scenario. A corresponding social graph for the SOE depicts the concept of engagement for the shared customer data environment expressed as one of the following four levels of relationship:

1. From the initial state of Communication → exchange of information in a relationship
2. Through Coordination → communicating status while working separately
3. Then Cooperation → working separately together
4. To fully realize Collaboration → working separately together using intellectual capital for sharing risk and reward

Note that each higher level inherits the properties of the lower levels.

The change management rationale for evolving the enterprise IT systems is to transform the corresponding business model and its fundamental strategy from product-centered to customer-centered. This transformation drives data management practices that enable reengineering decision-making processes.

Elements of the BAR Road Map are represented using a balanced scorecard to describe and measure the CIO-CMO partnership alignment gap in the context of the moments of engagement that drive the transformation from a SOR to a SOE. An example of the balanced scorecard for the “as-is” SOR is shown in Figure E.14. Such a tool is used to assess how to best vet the internal/external collaboration activities associated with management of big data for driving advanced business analytics initiatives. This is accomplished by measuring the strategic readiness of the intangible assets associated with human capital, information capital, and organizational capital, which describe the knowledge perspective of the balanced scorecard. The methodology for how the business agility readiness road map works is shown in Figure E.15 in terms of a gap analysis for a Sonoma Sneakaway scenario based on the Selling Sonoma County Wine Country case study.

Strategic visitor experience alignment may be expressed in terms of a vVIC road map for SOE implementation. The vVIC road map is a framework for a visitor experience management (VEM) solution that integrates DMO strategy with operational execution. This framework, built on enterprise performance management principles, consists of six interrelated elements:

1. DMOs develop the VEM strategy.
2. DMOs plan the strategy execution using the balanced scorecard, as well as vVIC concept of operation and architecture.
3. Use vVIC to align DMO operations and employees by means of formal organizational communications processes as well as human capital management practices, policies, and processes.
4. Plan operations using vVIC to design and deliver visitor experiences in accordance with the VEM Strategy.
5. DMOs monitor the performance of the ecosystem operations and evaluate the strategy via regular management review meetings facilitated by vVIC Business Intelligence tools.
6. Analyze internal DMO operational data and external destinational market environmental information in order to adapt the VEM Strategy via vVIC.

The analysis of vVIC touch points associated with the delivery of visitor services for the specific travel product content provides the context for optimization of travel life cycle decision making. That results in validation of performance criteria, and operational metrics described in the visitor experience Audit. This provides valuable insights for DMOs to evaluate their visitor experience strategy versus their capability to successfully deliver that experience. Such reengineering of the travel experience is referred to as “Strategic Visitor Experience Alignment” via center of excellence (CoE) for BAR.

Enterprises need to define the CoE in actionable terms. Gartner defines a CoE as “a physical or virtual center of knowledge concentrating existing expertise and resources in a discipline or capability to attain and sustain world-class performance and value across the supply chain” (Chadwick, 2014). Linking the CoE to tangible value in the value chain, either supply chain or demand chain, is achieved by focusing on the critical core competencies required to enable the Sonoma Sneakaway virtual enterprise strategy for collaborative marketing.

CoEs are critical enablers for the success of digital business value chains to facilitate business agility readiness in their business ecosystem. The dilemma of CIOs and CMOs in a digital business today is to know how to remain agile in execution while constantly looking ahead to future opportunities such as leveraging infonomics applications for BDA services. The CoE challenge is to avoid the “ivory tower” syndrome by maintaining the “silicon crystal ball” focus on the future while providing relevant insight to their virtual enterprise strategy execution challenges now.