The Speed of Flight

n the beginning, there was the old way of doing things. And it was bad. Defense Department travel vouchers took seven hours to fill out and four hours to process. Reimbursements took at least 15 days-often much, much longer. Travel administration ran 15 percent to 30 percent of direct travel costs (compared with about 5 percent in the private sector)-as much as a billion dollars badly spent each year. It was a severe case of the tail wagging the tooth.

In 1993, a voice was heard from above: Reinvent government, said Vice President Al Gore. Make travel management faster, better, cheaper. Automate it. Make it paperless and easier for travelers and travel managers alike.

So in 1994, a task force made up of high-level representatives of all the armed services was charged with letting there be faster, better and cheaper travel management. The unprecedented gathering brought together all parts of DoD involved in travel process and policy, including accounting, financial management, personnel, bachelor officers quarters (BOQs) policy, travel policy, transportation policy and entitlements. The group handed down a new way of looking at travel.

"The [old] system was based on, 'We're going to trap those dirty cheaters,'" says Karen Alderman, head of the task force. "When you shift that paradigm, you can do a lot differently."

The task force set down a list of 10 commandments to guide the new approach. Commandments in hand, the task force smote several of the biggest beasts standing in the way of reform. With an eye on private-sector practices, the group walked legislative and regulatory changes through Congress and the agencies. It cut 230 pages of rules down to 17. It raised the level at which receipts were required from $25 to $75. It standardized reimbursement rates for first and last days of travel. It eliminated the certification requirement for long-distance calls. It took the Fire Safety Act reporting burden off travelers.

To do all this, the task force had to enlist legislators, the General Services Administration, the General Accounting Office, the government's Joint Financial Management Improvement Program (JFMIP), the IRS and the Office of Management and Budget-not to mention even more DoD components.

"Many of the changes didn't require new technology, just changes in business practices," says Alderman, who is now director of JFMIP. For example, civilians on travel were required to stay in BOQs unless space was unavailable. If they stayed in commercial lodging, they were required to go to the nearest BOQ and pick up a piece of paper certifying that they were exempt from the requirement to stay there. "There were a lot of very non-value-added activities," says Alderman.

The real costs of the old, bureaucratic, inefficient way of doing things, she says, were "unknown and unknowable."

The pace of the task force's work was intense, Alderman says. "Senior folks were held accountable and there was regular review-I mean regular. The pressure was extreme. Performance was measured against goals every Thursday."

Test of Faith

By late 1995, the task force was ready to put the new ways to the test. Twenty-seven sites tried out the new concepts and procedures.

The results were heartening: The pilot projects cut the number of steps needed to arrange and process a trip from 40 to 21, the amount of administrative time from 4.5 hours to 1.75 hours, reimbursement time by 48 percent and labor costs by 60 percent. Customer satisfaction rose between 33 percent and 72 percent on nine measures.

While the pilots were in process, the Defense Travel System's Project Management Office was born. Its director, Army Col. Albert Arnold, is responsible for acquisition and implementation of the system. Like the task force, his office had to bring together dozens of stakeholders to get the job done.

"Most people think of travel management as arrangements, but it's a lot more than that," says Arnold. "It includes policy, payment, accountability, audits, reconciliation, authorization and more. We had to have a broad perspective-to bring in not only all the services and agencies, but also all the components (including reserves and civilian) and all the disciplines (like transportation, finance and technology).

"All told, we're juggling 20-plus organizations with at least 16 functional areas in each one," says Arnold. "People don't understand why it's taking us so long, but that's one big reason."

The office released a request for proposals in June 1997. For $267 million over eight years, it sought vendors to do two things: 1) put into place a common user interface that would eventually serve all Defense sites and installations worldwide, and 2) provide official and leisure travel management services for Defense Travel Region 6, which includes 11 states in the Midwest with more than 1,200 military sites. The vendor would use commercial, off-the-shelf (COTS) software and integrate the user interface and travel management projects.

Like many recent government contracts, this one transfers the burden of the project's financial success to the vendor. While a portion of the $267 million is paid directly to contractors, most of it is made up of fees they will receive for each transaction processed after the system is up and running.

Following the tenets of acquisition reform and best industry practices, the office tried to lay out what it wanted done but not how the vendors would do it.

This was not the usual way. At a forum for potential bidders, Arnold told the audience how to find the RFP on the Web. A vendor rep asked for a hard copy. Arnold said that wouldn't be possible, adding, "If you don't have access to the Web, then we probably don't want to do business with you."

Information technology firm BDM International (which shortly after was gobbled up by TRW) won the contract in May 1998; the award immediately was protested by also-ran EDS Corp. Work was halted until September, when the protest was denied.

Unnatural Relations

Because DoD sought disparate capacities-COTS travel management software and travel services in addition to the user interface-Defense officials specified that the prime contractor had to come to the table with a team of partners.

Rich Fabbre, TRW's program manager for DTS, admits to being skeptical at first about merging travel services with software and the interface on one contract. He's now realized, he says, that "the government had great foresight-the team has been greatly strengthened by having the travel partner in with us." TRW's principal partners are American Express for travel services and Gelco for its Travel Manager software.

The government also was seeking somewhat unnatural relations with its prime contractor. "I remember the phrase in the RFP," says Fabbre, " 'Government desires to partner with . . .' You tend to think 'yeah, yeah, sure, they're not really interested in partnering.' But there has been a truly open relationship between TRW and the project management office. [It's] a credit to the government."

To meet the Defense Department's needs, TRW took Gelco's software, which is designed to run on a local area network, and "put it on steroids," says Fabbre, to make it run centrally across all of DoD. From the traveler's point of view, he says, it will look and work the same way.

TRW also proposed stronger security than the government asked for. A powerful way of verifying users' identities, known as public-key encryption, will be required not only for electronic signatures and approvals, but also to log onto the system. "We don't wait until someone is about to get paid before making sure we're not dealing with a hacker," Fabbre says.

Many Rivers to Cross

However tight the partnership between TRW and DoD, it hasn't prevented the project from foundering on rocky shores. The team has survived many delays, but none like the one it ran into when testing the system at Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri.

Security firewalls at Whiteman (and many other military installations worldwide) were not compatible with the security features TRW had built into the travel system. "We could have fixed it for Whiteman, but that would have forced us to do it for each site individually, which would be less efficient and economical," says Arnold. "So we said OK, time out." Working out the solution set back deployment in the Midwest by almost two years.

The delays are costly to both the Defense Department and the contractors. Because TRW and its team were due to make money on processing travel transactions, they've been working longer than planned with little to show for it. "If I had it to do over again, I could get a higher price," says Fabbre. "It's turned out to be more work than we thought. There's just more of virtually everything than we thought."

The delays undermine the project's goals, says a government travel industry leader. "Two years from the award and we don't have a single site operational yet?" he says. "This is not helping them achieve their service or financial control goals, and there's no apparent end in sight."

As of mid-February, both Arnold and Fabbre were declaring victory. A redesigned configuration that uses a single port for all types of access (Web browser, client-server or Telnet) to the travel system was tested successfully at both Scott Air Force Base in Illinois and at Whiteman.

"The solution will work behind virtually any security system a local base or fort will have," Fabbre said.

Another hang-up was the 46 different accounting and disbursing systems throughout DoD that touch on travel. To enable them all to talk to the user interface, the project staff had to set up elaborate translation schemes.

Patience of a Saint

Neither TRW nor DoD will get specific about a new rollout date for the Midwest or the 20 other U.S. and overseas regions that will follow. "We learned that letting our schedule drive our testing didn't work," Fabbre says. "Now we're in the mode of letting our testing schedule drive our overall schedule."

"We're less deadline-oriented," echoes Arnold. "We're focusing instead on a quality product." He now expects the system to be deployed worldwide by December 2002, "but it's hard to predict. Everyone-internal and external-wants to know when, but a quality product a little bit later is better than something that doesn't work as well sooner."

There have been some suggestions that by the time the system is in place, the technology will be out of date. Both Arnold and Fabbre bristle at that idea. "We're still out in front of the travel industry for a full end-to-end solution," Arnold says.

The travel industry leader, who asked to remain unnamed, is a skeptic. "If you add together the deferment of decisions, the hard dollar costs and the lost opportunity costs, this has turned out to be an incredibly expensive proposition for DoD-and we don't know where it's going to end," he says. "The real question is: 'Does the emperor have any clothes or not?' "

But a defense transportation industry representative, who also sought anonymity, is optimistic. "They're replacing something [for which] the technology hadn't changed in 40 years," he says. "So if we end up with something only one iteration behind, that will still be an improvement."

To help meet the needs of travelers and travel managers in the meantime, DoD is making available "DTS Limited," a desktop version of Gelco's Travel Manager software that will not be plugged into a worldwide, centrally run system.

Prophecies

Technology isn't the Defense Travel System's only challenge. For the system to work, every one of the department's 3 million travelers needs to know about it and how to use it. Arnold moved to design an internal marketing campaign but got his wrist slapped. "DoD doesn't do marketing," he was told.

Instead, the 27-person project management office is planning a three-stage internal communications campaign to get the word out. It has put 22 reservists on active duty; they will fan out across Defense Travel Region 6, training travelers and authorizing officials.

Another hurdle is on the horizon: Arnold is planning to leave the project-and the Army-this spring. While his successor, Air Force Col. Pamela Arias, comes highly recommended, any change in leadership is destabilizing.

When its job is done, the DTS Project Management Office will die a natural death. The U.S. Transportation Command will run the system, and the Military Traffic Management Command will remain the contracting agency.

DoD travelers worldwide are trying to be patient as DTS' kinks are worked out. But they're being sorely tried. Just ask Denise Henderson, who teaches leadership and management at Fort Belvoir, Va. Her students spend 12 weeks on site and are billed for lodging monthly.

"Each month, each student has to file a voucher to receive payment," Henderson says. "All have to be done in paper with four or five copies of lodging receipts. The vouchers are processed by our resource management shop and sent overnight to the Defense Finance and Accounting Service in Indianapolis. Often the folks who process the vouchers don't realize this is an ongoing TDY, so they only give them 75 percent of per diem on the first and last day of the month. On a good day, it takes three to four weeks for students to be paid. We get constant complaints from students who are under the reengineered system at home and are used to being paid in less than a week. Try explaining the discrepancy to students who can't pay their bills! We have had to add an extra person in the resource management shop to handle all the vouchers and associated issues."

Henderson's complaints aren't news to the DTS team, but by now they've accepted the slower pace of change.

"The technology is there," says Alderman. "[Making] these changes in a government environment is the problem."

Defense Travel System's 10 Commandments:

1. Thou shalt assume travelers are honest and responsible.

2. Thou shalt give immediate supervisors the power to approve travel and control travel budgets.

3. Thou shalt make travel rules simple and clear.

4. Thou shalt provide one-stop travel services.

5. Thou shalt enter data only once and consolidate the process onto one piece of paper.

6. Thou shalt eliminate bureaucratic burdens on travelers.

7. Thou shalt reimburse travelers promptly.

8. Thou shalt cut down on bookkeeping, recordkeeping and paperwork.

9. Thou shalt use best industry practices.

10. Thou shalt continuously reassess for improvement.

Let There Be Light

When the Defense Travel System finally sees the light of day, it will:

• Allow travelers to request authorization, make arrangements and submit claims from a desktop computer.
• Reduce the time it takes to make travel arrangements and process vouchers.
• Require only one approval signature.
• Signal authorizing officials if a traveler requests something that deviates from established per diems, travel regulations, distance tables or other standards.
• Provide rapid reimbursement.
• Trigger random, rather than routine, audits.
• Yield a database that can facilitate reporting for better planning and budgeting.
• Free administrative staff for other duties.
• Use public/private-key infrastructure to allow digital signatures and provide security for sensitive but unclassified information.
• Cut direct costs by 30 percent and voucher processing costs by 76 percent.