Travelport's CIO Helps Drive Product Innovation

Matt Minetola is the Chief Information Officer of Travelport, a UK-based travel and technology company and one of the three major Global Distribution System operators. As CIO, Minetola is responsible for leading all aspects of Travelport’s technology organization and for the technical delivery of its Travel Commerce Platform. He believes that the role of the CIO is evolving to one of helping to develop technology that helps the company distinguish itself with customers. He also believes that CIOs need to help drive the way in which companies develop products. 

Minetola has done all of the above during his tenure as CIO. To do this, Matt is focused on constantly identifying key technology enablers to help Travelport set itself apart. In this interview, we also discuss the value of the cloud, the importance of quickly digesting and managing data, Travelport’s focus on the customer experience, and a variety of other topics.

Peter High: Could you describe Travelport’s business for those who may not be familiar with it?

Travelport CIO Matt Minetola

Credit: Travelport

Matt Minetola: Travelport is a technology company in the travel space. We are at the core of most of the processing that takes place when people begin their journeys to travel around the world. Our company is focused on enabling the transaction of travel through our distribution platform to enable our suppliers, which are the hotels, car [rental agencies], and airlines of the world, to distribute their offers and brand across the globe. Our systems and platforms allow our customers to consume that data in a way where they can find what is most relevant to them.

High: As an IT leader within a company whose business is in technology, can you describe how IT differentiates itself and the role that IT plays in the organization?

Minetola: I am responsible for all the technology across the organization. Often, many traditional companies are primarily looking to enable the business or be a steward of the spend of technology and manage it. However, when you are the technology leader of a company that is technology-focused, it is essential to bring in technology that allows you to differentiate yourself. I believe that is the biggest difference between a technology company and a traditional one.

High: Can you give some examples of some of the areas in which you and your team have done what you just described?

Minetola: It is no secret that technology is constantly changing, and as it is changing, we are constantly trying to identify key technology enablers that will allow us or other technology companies to differentiate ourselves. Along with enabling the business, we create centers of excellence around some of the key enablers that we believe are common and core to the digital disruption that is happening across the globe, especially the ones in our industry. Some of these are as follows:

  • We want to be an expert in understanding the customer experience in today's world. Rather than using the cloud exclusively for DevOps or to be a development shop to leverage costs, we want to use it to drive experience, drive connectivity, and create solutions;
  • In today's technology world, machine learning and artificial intelligence [ML/AI] are essential core capabilities for a technology company;
  • As the amount of data continues to grow at an extremely fast pace, we are focused on our performance and our ability to scale. The ability or lack thereof to digest and manage that data in a real-time environment is the differentiating factor in a product or solution in today’s world.

High: You have been in your role at Travelport for nearly four years now. Can you talk about the changes that were necessary to people, processes, and technology in order to drive and leverage some of the capabilities you described relative to the customer experience, cloud, and ML/AI’s scale and performance?

Minetola: With people, we had to make sure that we could attract and maintain talent in the areas I discussed. One of our first actions around the people side was to build those core capabilities and to find the right talent. The process of how you build and design products when undergoing a digital transformation is a key piece that changes within the organization. In today's world, if you are the leader of technology within a technology company, it becomes incumbent upon you to change how the organization builds and develops products.

For example, an organization can go from moving their product development through their sales and marketing organizations to creating a process around the technology that is more iterative and more aligned with expertise in each of those iterations. This allows them to collapse the product development cycle to focus on some core areas:

  • The incremental value and how the customer perceives the value that they are getting;
  • Making sure that whatever capability is being delivered can be plugged in an open environment. Changing that process is critical in taking an organization through their digital transformation;
  • We made sure to have an innovation portion of the business focused on those key enablers. Whether these enablers are blockchain, augmented reality, or another technology, it is critical to constantly pilot them and understand where they are in their evolution and the value you believe they can provide to the organization long-term.

Our main priorities were around getting the right people to change how our organization developed products, as well as ensuring that the technologies in front of us and beyond the horizon were understood and integrated into the flow.

High: In the areas that you mentioned, how do you determine the amount of progress that is being made?

Minetola: It comes down to customer satisfaction. If you think about the mobile market, it is all about the experience. It is critical that the apps in the marketplace have over four stars. The idea of these apps being received in that manner is a newer metric that likely would not have been measured 10 years ago.

Additionally, the adoption rate and the on-boarding of your new technology is critical. In every industry, customers have to deal with these new technologies, so it is crucial to keep an eye on the adoption. Simply getting the technology out into the marketplace is not enough. People are taking on newer products at a faster pace than we have ever seen, which has become a key indicator to ensure that we are going in the right direction.

High: What are some of the new factors that drive a strong customer experience in a digital role, and how has that evolved in your time at Travelport?

Minetola: I find the speed in which something becomes embedded into individuals core capabilities extremely interesting. It is one thing to have a product, software solution, or a platform as a service plugged into by customers. However, we want to take that a step further, and what we are focused on is making sure that our technology and our people are working with our customers to embed them into their solution. I view this as a fundamental component because it is not just about pumping out a product, putting it out there, having them buy it, and then maintain it. Instead, we work with our customers to understand what they are trying to do, take the skills we have, and then work with them to embed those technologies into their applications. This is because, for the most part, we are a B2B business that delivers to the C, which is an approach that is gaining traction across all of our customers. Instead of simply subscribing to something, our customers are now building out technology organizations because they are dealing with the same challenges and opportunities around technology.

Getting technology individuals to embed that began to fuel this change. From the experience they are delivering, we are starting to see those common experiences they are trying to drive across airlines, hotels, or cars. This helps us embed some of those attributes inherently into our technology so that they can start to move up the scale of the experience.

High: You have had an interesting career, much of it coming in a diverse set of financial services organizations, such as Dun & Bradstreet, ADVANTA, and Bank One/First USA. From there, you rose through the ranks of HP to become the CIO of Hewlett-Packard Financial Services. Because Travelport is a different type of company, your switch represented a bit of a left turn. What appealed to you in this opportunity, and what do you believe you were able to leverage from your experiences?

Minetola: I was able to leverage scale from my financial services experiences. The reliability of the scale and the requirement to be clear and crisp about what you deliver is at the core of what financial services has been doing for dozens of years. Other industries are just now starting to come into the scale and refinement that the financial service business has had.

Coming to Travelport represented a bit of a switch because when I was at HP, a part of my job was to frequently go out with our customers. It became clear that HP’s digital transformation was not about products or technology, but it was about how you bundled them together with your end-to-end solution. It became evident that the companies that were doing this well were the ones that were winning, and the companies who were doing this poorly were losing. Travelport’s industry is completely dependent on technology's ability to tie large-scale amounts of data into a great experience. This allowed me to leverage my marketing and financial experiences from my days in financial services, and that is what excited me. Looking back, this experience is exactly what I thought it was going to be. It has been all about the technology solutions that are going to drive the end user’s experience, specifically in a way that is personalized. That was a perfect sweet spot for me.

High: Can you talk about some of the rising technology trends that are on your personal roadmap?

Minetola: There is a great deal of conversation around the cloud’s ability to do DevOps, scale, and reduce cost. However, I believe the value of the cloud is around your ability to push large-scale compute anytime and anywhere. In the travel industry, the more I can create an experience or a device that creates an experience for you, the more you are going to want to use it. The baseline around this involves the ability to take content distribution networks and dynamic content distribution and move it. From there, the ability to add scale is critical. For a customer who wants to get the full experience of traveling to several countries in a few minutes, the more video and complex augmented reality I can provide them, the more they are going to be able to experience it and choose.

For most, the two enablers are going to be how they leverage the cloud to distribute that content and how they are able to deal with the scale and performance. The only way you are going to be able to drive that scale and performance is going to be with machine learning and your ability to manage large amounts of data. The more I can see these aspects feeding off each other, the more I can process, and the more I am going to want to process. The more that I can figure that out and preload it, pre-know who you are, and pre-know what you have looked at, the more I am going to be able to enrich that experience for that person in that five to 10 minutes that they have.

