For almost forty years, Barry Shuler has been a thought leader in the information technology field and a futurist focused on formulating long range technology strategies and plans for leading companies in a number of industries. Presently he is Chief Information Officer and IT Consulting Principal for Design Management Associates, Inc., a commercial building architecture and design firm his wife Sue founded in 1994.For thirteen years, prior to joining DMA in 2009, Mr. Shuler was SVP IT Strategy and Chief Technology Officer for Marriott International,Inc. In his last two years at Marriott Mr. Shuler was also SVP and Chief Information Officer of The Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, LLC.,Marriott's… luxury hotel subsidiary.From 2004-2008 Mr. Shuler also served on the Board of Directors of Hotel Technology Next Generation (www.htng.org) a hotel industry trade association which promotes the emergence of common specifications for interoperability among commercially availableand custom developed hotel systems. He also served as President of HTNG from 2007-2008.Prior to joining Marriott, Mr.Shuler worked for more than twelve years as an information technology consultant for Fortune 100 companies and government agencies.For the first thirteen years of his career, Mr. Shuler played a variety of roles in electronic and communications engineering and information technology at Western Electric Company, Bell Laboratories, and AT&T.Mr. Shuler has been honored with numerous awards for excellence in information technology including: 2005 InformationWeek Top 25CTO's, 2005 Hospitality Technology Visionary for leading the industry towards innovative business intelligence solutions, and 2007 Computerworld Premier IT Leader.Mr. Shuler has authored and been featured in numerous computing and communications articles, and has made contributions to manybooks on information technology. He is a popular speaker at conferences and seminars on enterprise architecture, business processreengineering, IT-enabled change, ITmetrics, technology convergence, and strategic planning for information technology.Virtual Travel: Embrace or Expire is the first full-length work for which Mr. Shuler is the sole author. He sincerely hopes that you willenjoy it!