How to Optimize Existing IT by Modernizing Travel Processes

There is a concentrated effort today in the technology world for businesses to navigate towards becoming a digital business.

This is not a simple turn-key solution, nor is it something easily achieved without taking a step-by-step approach to your complex environments.

Let's face it, there have been many commitments made in the past to certain technology paths. There are legacy investments that are still returning enough value to cause hesitation when reaching to pull their plug. There could be partially completed projects that were chosen in the course of spending political capitol, making it nearly impossible to abandon them without endangering the entire IT landscape.

These are just a few of the issues that necessitate one of the first steps being to evaluate optimizing existing IT investments.

Existing IT

When looking to update or modernize the existing IT investments, it's about optimizing existing work.

There are many systems, services, applications and processes that make up the IT landscape. The trick is to obtain a view of them while moving towards business goals, leveraging quick wins by bringing together existing work in new and effective ways.

Business processes can often be found that leverage existing components, that once organized in a new way begin to immediately provide new business value. To illustrate this line of thought, let's imagine how leveraging existing deployed workloads and services help to optimize an existing travel agency.

Modernizing travel processes

Each example below is optimizing by leveraging existing projects and investments, while deploying in a modern container-based Cloud platform using open technologies. They may exists as standard hosted hardware deployments, on private cloud solutions, in public cloud hosting or in hybrid-cloud environments. All four footprints are possible when leveraging open technologies and modern application development, showcased through the Red Hat Cloud Suite product.

Travel bookings process

This first example is from a bookings process that was rather simple, leveraging hotel and flight look up services along with some validation logic. There were still manual steps that required the office employees to contact and verify the bookings with travelers before manually booking the trip with payment information.

Several quick wins were identified that helped to quantify the manual user interactions, to automate the price calculations with centralized business logic and finally with a slight adjustment a small process extension can automate payment validations with eventual roll-back of the booking if needed.

Available online in Red Hat Demo Central and leveraging open technologies such as JBoss EAP and JBoss BPM Suite along with the OpenShift Container Platform, the Travel Agency bookings demo project delivers a nice optimized solution with several quick wins from existing services and business logic. The solution can also be built from scratch by following this online free workshop.

Destinasia automation and integration

This example puts you in the driver seat to experience full application integration with containerized services delivering a complex bookings discount solution for a fictitious Destinasia travel company.

Your tasked as the lead developer of the Destinasia travel discount project to set up a development environment in the Cloud for container-based application services deployments. Once it's set up, you're validating the services using end-to-end testing. Tasks include installing OpenShift Container Platform (OCP), JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (EAP), JBoss Business Rules Management System (BRMS), several containerized web services and testing the solution using a REST client.

This project can be installed and explored in this online free workshop.

Available online at Red Hat Demo Central and leveraging open technologies such as JBoss EAP and JBoss BPM Suite along with the OpenShift Container Platform, the Destinasia travel discount example is delivering a modernized and integrated travel solution leveraging existing investments.

Optimize IT series

AppDev in the Cloud with Red Hat Cloud Suite

This is not the only article in the series.

If interested in reading more you can catch up on the other areas learning how optimizing process applications enables leveraging your existing investments:

• Modernizing HR processes
• Modernizing Financial processes
• Modernizing Retail processes
• Modernizing Travel processes

Stay tuned for the other articles coming soon.