Services Safari

Can You Trust Your Travel Firm?

                         Betrayed By Your Travel Provider?

Suppose you kept running into your worst competitor at every prospect you are selling services. That would make you more than a little suspicious wouldn't it? Suppose you were trying to negotiate a merger but those meetings kept getting disrupted by competitors and media who knew where you were meeting. Suppose you were trying to negotiate better T&E arrangements with major agencies or providers only to find that all sorts of firms know more about your travel activities than you do or they should?

Sound improbable? Scary? All of the above? Read this SoftwareSafari post concerning Siemens unpleasant discovery.

That a services firm discovered this and went public about it is very interesting and commendable. I hope their actions cause more service firms to understand who else has access to their employee prescription purchases, the web sites employees surf, the medical claims of their executives, etc. It's time service firms, especially IT service firms, take a leading role in defining the limits that should exist on the rights of others to access and use the transaction data of their firms and their employees.

More on Consulting Travel Costs

            Additional Comments on Consulting Travel Costs

I got some interesting comments on last week's piece on consulting and software vendor travel cost.

Here are a couple of additional thoughts to ponder:

• I was genuinely surprised to see how some small firms spent considerably more than large firms. Their costs clearly seem out-of-line.
• Some of the high-end management consultancies were very generous with their travel and T&E costs. Apparently, I must not be taking my clients to the same class of restaurant or ordering the same caliber of wine.
• Accounting firms were in the Top 100 but given their size, their travel costs may be acceptable

One writer questioned whether systems integrators were flying in too many out of town personnel, particularly when local talent exists. That's a valid issue and one all service buyers should address with their providers. The more specialized the skills and/or more senior the requested skills need to be, service buyers must expect more travel.

Another useful statistic would have been the percentage of reimbursable travel. Travel expenses for internal meetings is not value-added to clients and some of this clearly could be replaced with collaboration technology. Travel for training can be managed and with computer-based-training, can be reduced. Travel costs associated with Marketing activities should be carefully managed by these service firms; however, some of the responsibility for this is prospect driven. How is that? Take a current prospect of mine. This F500 firm has asked my team to present to them 3 times now. They've had 1-2 of us out on several other occasions, too. Were they not local, we would have never put up with this. I no longer will. They need to make a decision and get on with it.

Transparency is always identified as good for management and shareholders. More transparency into travel costs of service providers is helpful in contract discussions and in the operations of these firms. If you're a service provider, how well are you managing T&E? Could you improve?