Agencies increase adoption of e-travel services

Agencies are moving slowly toward deploying Web-based travel management services to reduce the time and cost it takes employees to apply for and receive approval for travel.

Comment on this article in The Forum.Under President Bush's E-Gov Travel Service, agencies were to be using an automated travel management system by the end of 2006. But the transformation has been slow as agencies train employees to use the new applications. "You're dealing with change management," said Kay Levy, director of customer service in the office of the chief financial officer at the Agriculture Department.

As of March 31, 2008, 10 out of the 24 largest agencies had fully deployed on E-Gov Travel, and another 10 agencies were in the process of migrating. In addition, of the 2.9 million government travel vouchers issued, more than 367,000 were serviced through the E-Gov Travel initiative. Once it's fully deployed, the initiative is expected to cut federal travel management costs by as much as 50 percent.

The number of travel vouchers being processed on the travel applications is increasing. This week, Northrop Grumman Corp. announced that its GovTrip application, which provides end-to-end online travel services, from planning to authorization and reimbursement, had processed more than 1 million travel vouchers for federal employees. In July, more than 65,000 vouchers were processed, with more than 9,000 users logged on to the application each workday.

Northrop is one of three companies, along with CW Government Travel Inc. and EDS, that hold contracts to develop and host travel planning applications.

Initial adoption of E-Gov Travel services was slow. Agriculture began a phased approach for deploying GovTrip in 2007, and expects the application to be available departmentwide by the end of November. It replaces a paper-based process for travel management that involved filling out request forms that were signed by supervisors, then manually entered into a legacy financial application on a mainframe computer. The turnaround took a week and a half under the old system; with GovTrip, travel approval is less than three days.

The key to successful implementation so far has been training, according to Levy said. "Whenever you go to any kind of new business process or system, you have to be willing to work with [people]," she said. "We worked with our agencies to develop training strategies, by defining the various roles and having appropriate training for those roles - whether traveler, travel arranger, travel approver, or those that will be system administrators, making sure data is input appropriately. We were very hands on."