Media: IT Plays Key Role Behind The Scenes

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By Clinton Wilder
Issue date: Sept. 9, 1996

he media industry would seem to be one of the more glamorous places for IT professionals these days. Glitzy new Web sites, high-profile partnerships like Microsoft and NBC's MSNBC cable-TV channel, and mega-mergers such as Turner Broadcasting and Time Warner have made terms like interactivity and convergence part of IT parlance.

But savvy medi a CIOs know that the flashiest Internet news service or "Webzine" won't translate into bottom-line success if the company doesn't have a solid and flexible IT infrastructure behind it. "Infrastructure is not glamorous," says Sadie Decker, CIO and senior VP of advanced IT at cable giant Tele-Communications Inc. in Englewood, Colo. "The glamour is on the front end, but you live or die on the back end."

Traditionally, media companies have not been on the leading edge in IT. But the recent online and interactive revolution has demanded that media business and marketing executives quickly become technology experts, because key business opportunities depend on it.

However, that's a double-edged sword for media CIOs, because business promises have often outpaced the ability of technology to deliver on them. Interactive television is the most visible (and expensive) example. The concept of video-on-demand and interactive shopping through TV was very appealing, but t he necessary back-end transaction and billing systems proved to be an insurmountable challenge.

"It was really easy to think this stuff up," says Decker. "It was not so easy to actually make it happen."

What Decker and her team are making happen at TCI is one of the world's largest distributed database projects, called Summit (Subscriber Media Management Technology). Targeted for completion in 1997, Summit will migrate TCI's disparate customer billing and profile databases into 16 integrated Sybase 11 databases running on Sun Microsystems SparcCenter 100E servers. The projected customer capacity of Summit: 30 million.

That's big, but it also has to be flexible. Since the Summit development project began three years ago, TCI, led by hard-charging, no-nonsense CEO John Malone, decided to go into the digital TV business. Its 80-channel service will be launched this fall to compete with satellite services like DirecTV, but TCI's service will be delivered over land lines to reach more remote areas. A p art of Summit called Summitrak will be the billing engine and infrastructure for the new business.

This fall, TCI also plans to launch @Home, a high-speed cable modem Internet service in Silicon Valley. Thanks to telecom deregulation, it also will begin offering telephone service over cable. "Infrastructure is everything with these products," says Decker. "And it has to be flexible, because this [pace of new product offerings] isn't going to stop."

That challenge--somewhat akin to changing the tires on a car going 60 miles an hour--is also a high priority in the movie business. While the dazzling special-effects technologies of LucasFilm and Industrial Light & Magic explode on screens across America, armies of IT professionals are slogging through the development trenches in Burbank and Studio City implementing client-server applications from PeopleSoft, Oracle, and other vendors.

Disney, Warner Brothers, Fox, and MCA/Universal are all in the process of replacing legacy "stovepipe" systems wit h enterprisewide client-server applications, says Mike Harris, a partner in Andersen Consulting's entertainment, media, and information services practice in El Segundo, Calif.

"Most of the financial and transaction systems at these companies are at that 10-to-15-year mark," Harris says. "It can be tough to show a return on investment for replacing them, but it's more about survival. You can't operate a business if you don't have the right information across the business."

New technologies in film production go beyond visual effects to the digitizing of film assets, allowing easier film editing and reusable footage. On the production end, movie studios have the same goals as almost any manufacturer--lower production costs and faster time to market.

Steven Spielberg's DreamWorks SKG studio is driving the all-digital vision, and larger established studios have no choice but to follow. "This is going to be the way to compete and deliver high-quality movies on a more frequent basis," says Harris.

D igitizing content is also arguably the No. 1 business challenge for print media companies, as having an online presence has gone from leading-edge innovation to competitive necessity in less than two years. The competitive landscape in the delivery of online news content is as varied as it gets, ranging from Microsoft, with both MSNBC and the Slate Web magazine, to AT&T's LeadStory.com Web site. In between are countless Web startups, from PointCast Network to Individual Inc., offering instant news updates to PC users, replete with customizing options. All are competing for the same customers and advertising dollars as the traditional media outlets.

"It's a pretty challenging time," says Mark Morneau, VP of systems at Gannett Co. in Arlington, Va., the nation's largest newspaper company and publisher of USA Today. "Everyone is trying to figure out where people are going to go for news and information, because that's where the advertisers and the revenue will go. Nothing is staying the same. Just becaus e you're big doesn't mean you're going to win."

Indeed, small startups, unshackled by legacy systems, often have the advantage of speed. More than ever, that places the onus on media CIOs to develop systems and processes that are flexible. A joint venture between Gannett and Landmark Communications in Norfolk, Va., lets Gannett-owned papers that don't want to host their own Web sites do so on Landmark's InfiNet Web hosting and development service. About 40 Gannett papers already have tried it.

Gannett hopes a major applications reengineering effort will give it similar flexibility in advertiser relationships. The company is integrating traditionally separate customer databases from circulation, advertising, and marketing functions, as well as support applications such as accounts receivable. Gannett is rewriting the IBM AS/400-based applications with CASE (computer-aided software engineering) tools.

The overall goal, Morneau says, is the same as that of cross-functional integration in the banking industry: a single market view of the customer. "You can begin to respond better to your customers when you have a better understanding of their overall relationship with the company," he says. "It helps us evolve into a much more marketing and customer-oriented business."

Gannett isn't alone among major newspaper publishers in finding a business opportunity in the sale of internally developed industry applications. The New York Times Co. developed its Advertising Sales Information System (ASIS) with the help of EDS about a year ago and has since sold it to both the Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe.

The Lotus Notes- based application lets sales reps create ad mock-ups on their notebooks for advertisers, instead of having to wait for the production department to prepare a design.

"Before ASIS, Times salespeople spent only 25% of their time in front of customers," says Tom Harbison, president of EDS's media strategic business unit in Dallas. "Their goal was to double it and they succeed ed." The next step: The Times is working with EDS, Netscape, and Silicon Graphics to integrate ASIS with Internet technology and make it the core of a "virtual sales office" accessible by a Web browser on the corporate intranet.

Cross-functional integration isn't just happening on the advertising side of the newspaper business. Dow Jones & Co. is in the midst of a huge project with EDS to integrate all of its worldwide editorial operations into one system called the Global News Management System.

Targeted for full rollout in January 1998, GNMS will let any Dow Jones reporter access copy generated by any colleague worldwide from a UniSQL object database or Informix relational database. The first component of the project, the Authoring and Editing System, is already used by the Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition, which launched on the Web in April.

In print publishing, the business imperative is speed--compressing the supply chain and time to market. Although the same could be said about al most any industry, it's a relatively new concept to big publishers. "We were static for 130 years, and dynamic for only the past five," says Al Guibord, VP of IT at printing company R.R. Donnelley & Sons Inc. in Chicago.

Among the $200 million worth of reengineering projects to speed processes at R.R. Donnelley are a short-run, on-demand printing plant in Roanoke, Va., due to open next March, and an application that lets bookstores place and track orders over the Internet. Donnelley also plans to replace its disparate E-mail systems for its 20,000 users with a corporate intranet. Donnelley will standardize on Lotus cc:Mail as an interim step, but Guibord believes the HTML Web browser and TCP/IP intranet paradigm is the wave of the future. "It's coming along a lot quicker than anyone imagined," he says.

Donnelley plans to migrate its networks from frame relay to asynchronous transfer mode to accommodate growing demand. "We expect up to 200 terabytes in the next few years," says Guibord.

To comp lete initiatives like these, Donnelley relies on an IT philosophy that echoes those at other media companies such as TCI and Gannett: flexibili-ty with standards.

"You're walking a tightrope," says Gannett's Morneau. "The technology is changing so you have to stay open, but you still have to be focused, because you can't support every new system that comes along. You have to bet right on technology, but also sense where the consumer is going. If you do that, any good platform will get you through."

To view the IW 500 Media chart in PDF format click here

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