Workgroups
Workgroups
HTNG Workgroups are small groups of experts, typically from the hotel and vendor community, but sometimes from consulting disciplines, academia, media, or other associations. Each workgroup is formed to address a specific business problem faced by hotels, such as content management, cellular coverage, or secure payment processing. A workgroup meets regularly over a period of time to design and implement solutions to the problems it is addressing. Typically, hotel participants help define the requirements, while vendors collaborate to design technology solutions.
A key difference between HTNG and other industry organizations is that HTNG's focus is facilitating the creation of industry solution sets, not standards. Workgroups are not designed to be think tanks, nor is their primary objective to create standards. Workgroups may indeed produce white papers, specifications, and other documents, but these are simply means to achieving the primary objective of a solution — something a hotel can buy from one or more vendors, that solves the original problem.
Don't get us wrong, we love standards. But in order to have real-world value, standards must be implemented. Many standards that are developed without commercial motivation become obsolete before they can achieve a critical mass of adoption. By focusing on the implementation first rather than the standard, HTNG's process increases the likelihood that the problem will solved quickly. If key companies implement a solution to address the business needs defined by an HTNG workgroup, it can often quickly become an official or de facto standard.
Workgroups go through a five-stage lifecycle, reflected as "status" in the table below:
- Prospective - an idea that has been suggested for a future workgroup, but that has not yet achieved critical mass to take forward.
- Incubation - the idea is refined into a formal proposed charter
- Active or Chartered - the charter has been approved and the workgroup is meeting regularly to produce its deliverables.
- Maintenance - the deliverables are complete, but the workgorup meets as needed and may make minor changes to specifications.
- Retired - the work is complete and the workgroup is no longer meeting. Or, in isolated cases, the workgroup disbanded without having achieved its proposed deliverables.
HTNG workgroups are listed below. In addition, HTNG has four other bodies that are not actually workgroups, but share some the characteristics of workgroups. In case you're looking for one of them, they are:
- The Infrastructure & Device Forum
- The Software Forum
- The Governance Council (will open wiki page in a new window)
- The Infrastructure Resource Team (will open wiki page in a new window)
Workgroup |
Description |
Status |
|
Above-Property Systems |
Identify and document standards to support interoperability, security, and management of hotel systems designed to be run in a data center or the cloud rather than on-property. |
Prospective |
|
Standardized the handoff of financial data from PMSs and POSs to back-office systems. Most recently, created a travel agent commissions specification. |
Retired |
|
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Addressing cellular phone coverage issues for hotels, by creating a specification for an IP connected device with the appropriate RF interface for both licensed cellular and WiFi services. |
Maintenance |
|
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Standardized the definition of customer profile, making data exchange easier, less expensive, and less time-consuming. Standardized hand-off of information regarding loyalty programs and points/miles between and among CRM systems, CRS/PMS systems, and loyalty management systems. |
Maintenance |
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Simplifying low-level communications among guest-room devices (electrical controls, consumer electronics, HVAC, minibars, safes, door locks, etc.) by standardizing key aspects of inter-device messaging. |
Maintenance |
|
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Standardized the interface between catering and event management systems and digital signage systems. |
Retired |
|
|
Standardized the exchange of descriptive and illustrative content among hotels, content management systems, and distribution systems. |
Retired |
|
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Creating an interoperable solution for remote-controls with hospitality functionality, built on HDMI'S CEC standard. |
Maintenance |
|
| Enterprise Timekeeping | Would develop a solution to standardize timekeeping records to be able to compare against sales and revenue data from the point-of-sale and allow for player tracking systems to be able to view trends, labor costs and productivity. |
Prospective |
|
Addressing the automated delivery of RFPs from meeting planners, through intermediary systems, directly into hotel sales and catering systems |
Active |
|
|
Creating a series of best practice documents and webinars to describe how to effectively deliver and deploy a fiber network to and within a hotel. The documents/webinars will cover an introduction to fiber and PON technology and design guides for a new builds and retrofits. |
Active |
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Standardized the extraction of folio line-item detail from PMSs, for use by VAT recovery, loyalty, expense reporting, and analytical programs. |
Maintenance |
|
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Standardized the exchange of menu and order information between a Point-of-Sale System and a system managing a user interface (e.g. on a TV, tablet, or website) through which a guest can order food & beverage. |
Retired |
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Produced a white paper in 2005 regarding the future of guest room technology. |
Retired |
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Standardizing interaction between PMSs and guest-room devices, including provisioning and customization instructions, acknowledgement of correct provisioning, and de-provisioning. |
Retired |
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Standardized interfaces between hotel-based systems, such as PMS and POS, and guest-facing devices and systems (such as kiosks, TVs, and the web), to enable guests to book activities within the hotel, such as spa, dining, or golf. |
Retired |
|
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Identifying and solving the technical challenges for hotels to deploy entertainment systems in a hosted model, with little or no on-premises equipment. |
Maintenance |
|
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Designing solutions and standards for hosted capturing and processing of credit-card information, with secure application of the payment information back to hotelier systems. |
Retired |
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Attempted to addressed management of user rights across multiple systems. This workgroup did not produce meaningful deliverables and was subsequently disbanded. |
Retired |
|
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Take advantage of remote addressability of guest-room devices to proactively monitor their health and react appropriately before the guest discovers a problem. |
Active |
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Standarized interfaces for self check-in and check-out functionality between kiosks (and other self-service devices) and property management systems. |
Retired |
|
| Mobile Device Identification & Authentication | A standard process for registering a device once with (for example) a hotel or brand) so that the device and its user can be recognized automatically whenever it is in range of any access point within the hotel (or brand). |
Active |
| Mobile Device Location | A standard data structure for describing the location of a device within a venue, including spatial coordinates and common-language descriptions (e.g. “Lobby”). |
Incubation |
| Mobile Device Pairing with Entertainment Systems | Identify existing or developing new standards to support simple pairing of arbitrary guest mobile devices with hotel entertainment systems. |
Incubation |
|
Near-Field Communications |
Identify and develop solutions for the use of NFC technology in hotels, potentially including payments, door lock systems, location services, and other applications. |
Prospective |
|
Developed a standardized approach for the exchange of unstructured data between systems and generic data "push" and "pull" models. |
Retired |
|
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Standardized secure processing for credit-card transactions between hotel systems and payment processing gateways, using a secure data proxy (tokenization) approach. |
Retired |
|
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Enhanced the HTNG basic point-of-sale interface to achieve tighter integration for such processes as check zoom and end-of-day processing, and to improve the guest lookup facility. |
Maintenance |
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Standardized reservation delivery, rate control, availability control, group synchronization, statistics handoff, and other functions necessary for distribution processing. |
Active |
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Provides the “plumbing” layer of connectivity for all HTNG messages, known as the HTNG Web Services Framework (WSF), which enables two systems to reliably exchange any XML messages (HTNG or proprietary), vastly simplifying the implementation of interfaces. Includes a publish-and-subscribe eventing model. |
Retired |
|
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Creating reference architectures for the hospitality industry including business, application, and data architectures. |
Maintenance |
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Defined an industry framework for secure processing of payment card information, built on existing tokenization approaches, to enable most hotel systems to move outside the scope of PCI requirements, while providing secure end-to-end processing across ALL of the parties and systems that may be involved in a transaction as it flows through the distribution chain. |
Maintenance |
|
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Shared Global Network |
Create a global managed network in which one (or more) vendor(s) would be able to provide end-to-end connectivity. Currently this is only available regionally, and not in all locations. |
Prospective |
|
Shared Guest-Room Device Services |
Enable third parties to remotely manage and monitor the health and state of guestroom devices, with the potential to deliver a superior guest experience, better energy management, and less costly and intrusive device maintenance. |
Prospective |
|
Standardized the synchronization of customer profiles, itineraries, and folio posting across PMS and activity systems, to provide a cooperative experience for hotel guests, as well as for staff working with disparate systems such as Property Managment, Spa, Golf, Concierge, Dining, Ski, and other activity systems. |
Retired |
|
|
Developed a specification for an IP PBX and hospitality SIP handset. |
Maintenance |
*Some efforts listed here were never formally chartered as workgroups, but operated as teams within larger workgroups that were subsequently split up.