The new (e)commerce/(e)business paradigms forced enterprises to undertake important transformations and reorganizations. It happened with the web and will be repeated in the Cloud and social networks, following Eric Schmidt’s (Google CEO) thoughts, “better thinking now on WWC – World Wide Computer, that is, what is behind u-commerce, ubiquity”. The tourism is no more only a traditional commercial activity but ever more social- and information-oriented. The tourism services need to be effective to be aligned with tourist requirements. The globalization and easy access allows tourists to change their plans constantly. Dynamic services reconfiguration and resulting impact on their information systems need to be supported. The theme here presented explores new tourism services requirements as the ubiquity and dynamic reconfiguration, new brokering mechanisms, and reliable integration processes, and human-to-human synchronous collaboration allow the natural involvement of the tourist on the co-creation of his activity plan with other agents (humans).
TopIntroduction
The web is surely the main event after the appearance of the personal computer and quickly became the main mediator for information sharing, communication and presence on a worldwide scale. However, we assist to a complete and definitely “disintegrated” amount of data, business and processes. We are facing now the opposite situation of the initial isolated processing power, having disperse units (now services) struggling to get in touch. Transform data into useful information and opportunity into business is a high challenge of nowadays. Client’s fidelity and trust were relegated to opened concurrency, QoS (Quality of Services) and effectiveness.
The new (e)commerce/(e)business paradigms forced enterprises to undertake important transformations and reorganizations (intra- and inter-organization). It happened with the web and will be repeated in the Cloud and social networks, following Eric Schmidt (Google CEO) thoughts “better thinking now on WWC – World Wide Computer, that is, what is behind u-commerce, ubiquity”.
The tourism activities and enterprises are particular cases which show clearly this continuous transformation and impacts of internet acceptance. There are a lot of web places which offer multiple tourism services, from simple information to complete activity planning, including accommodation reservation and travel. However, not everything looks easy indeed. The general web tourism service focuses essentially the business activity and not the tourists. By one side it is complex to get several (unknown, distinct or distrustful) entities working together according to a specific dynamic changing plan; on the other, the personal perspective and participation of tourist are not fully considered on delivery of the results.
The tourism is no more a traditional commercial activity but more social and information-oriented. The tourism services need to be effective to be aligned with tourist requirements. The globalization and easy access (to information and proposals), allows tourists to change constantly their plans. Future challenge requires dynamic tourism services reconfiguration and consequent impact on related information systems, for one hand, and collaboration mechanisms to allow tourist participate on the decision, to the other.
Being cloud computing the most recent emerging paradigm (Coppinger, 2007), it comes nothing more than another “advanced” tentative to get the same, unless tourism services becomes ubiquitous “processing units” which are easily discovery, composed and coordinated. The same happened with traditional tourism activities: those who remained unknown did not survive!
Since future context demands new tourism services, sustained by new ubiquity and dynamic reconfiguration requirements, an effective brokering mechanism and innovative reliable integration processes based on human-to-human synchronous collaboration which allows the natural involvement of the tourist on the co-creation/co-design (co-management) of his activity plan with other agents (humans).