ICT and e-business in the tourism industry ICT adoption ... - empirica

Tourism
The influence of outsourcing on organisational structure is likewise low, as only 10% of
companies – especially the large ones – have outsourced their ICT services to external
service providers. However, outsourcing proves to have a high potential impact on
organisational structure, as there is a strong trend towards outsourcing in tourism
industries. In 2005, about 31% of tourism companies outsourced more ICT services than
in the previous year, while only an insignificant number of companies said that they
outsourced less (cf. chapter 3.2.2 ‘Outsourcing of ICT services and ICT investments’).
Generally, ICT is more deeply ingrained in business operations of large tourism players.
This again might have an impact on competition. In-depth ICT integration contributes to
work-flow and business processes optimisation / acceleration in large enterprises where
business operations are already to a large extent ICT-based and automated. Hence, the
competitive advantage of large enterprises might even increase in the future.
The overall statistical picture provides sufficient evidence for the claim that large
enterprises drive ICT development and are clear e-business vanguards in the tourism
industry. Hence, SMEs, and especially micro enterprises, should be more decisive in
making use of e-business and investing in ICT respectively. In 2005, about twice as many
large companies (80%) have made ICT investments as micro enterprises (40%). On the
other hand, the e-Business Survey 2006 revealed micro enterprises as those companies
with the highest disposition to increase their ICT budgets in the future. Policy initiatives
with the aim to strengthen micro companies in tourism - which constitute the vast majority
of enterprises in this sector - should have a closer look at this issue.
High ICT impact on customer services and internal work organisation
ICT influence on companies’ business is to a large extent considered positive, while
negative influences of ICT are perceived to be very low. As could be expected, strong
ICT influence is perceived particularly in the front-end area, i.e. in the customer
service domain, which is probably a result of well established online booking and e-
marketing activities – similar to findings from previous e-Business W@tch surveys.
Customer-facing e-business activities are the only domain that substantially outstrips the
average figures of other industries (cf. chapter 3.9 ‘Summary of the quantitative
analysis’).
Interestingly, however, the influence of ICT on the back-end area – internal work
organisation, business process efficiency, productivity and revenue growth – has been
perceived (almost) equally strong as well. This could be explained by a growing reliance
of companies on digital business environments (e.g. for e-invoicing or e-procurement)
and, to a smaller extent, by the trend to integrate customer-facing operations with backoffice
systems. Given the moderate adoption of software systems for internal process
integration (intranet, ERP system, document management system, supply chain
management, ICT system linked with customers) and for collaborative B2B processes,
there is substantial future development potential, especially since paper-based processes
still dominate financial (and probably other) work flows among tourism companies (cf.
chapters 3.4.2 ‘Use of ICT for cooperative and collaborative business processes’ and
3.4.1 ‘Use of software systems for internal process integration’).
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