Avengers, Assemble! Marvel's first strategic IT plan comes from superpowered
collaboration between the CIO and the lines of business. by Aaron Lazenby, May
...
Avengers, Assemble! Marvel's first strategic IT plan comes from superpowered collaboration between the CIO and the lines of business. by Aaron Lazenby, May 2008
Media conglomerate Marvel Entertainment is best known as a comic book publishing powerhouse, but the company also markets its more than 5,000 characters as toys, apparel, video games, screensavers, cell phone wallpaper, TV shows, and more. Since 2006, Senior Vice President and CIO Glenn Magala has worked to update Marvel's information technology (IT) operations to emphasize strategy and collaboration. This new focus is giving the company a strategic advantage in the media marketplace. According to Magala, Marvel several years ago made a wise investment in Oracle E-Business Suite Financials to manage corporate finances, but the majority of data gathered and created in the lines of business (LOBs) was not connected to Marvel's central financial information. As a result, systems were not linked together to obtain new forms of insight and intelligence about the business. Magala, with the support and input from Marvel's LOBs, has implemented an IT strategy that focuses on a single datasource for the company using business applications that facilitate collaboration among the LOBs. Read how Marvel is working to expand its existing Oracle footprint to merge and unify existing data with the ultimate goal to improve data accuracy and reduce the time to market of data. Magala wants to provide new data-mining capabilities and give visibility to information that the verticals have had trouble accessing easily. The data set is still evolving, but the user interface, which is an intelligence dashboard that enables users to get information specific to their job function, is already generating new value. In addition, Marvel is already achieving significant benefits with its brand assurance system built on Oracle's Stellent content management system. The drama of modern business sometimes operates at comic book scale—larger-than-life characters, heroic risks, struggles for dominance, and sometimes even crushing defeats. So it should come as no surprise that Marvel Entertainment, Inc.—the progenitor of Spider-Man, Iron Man, the Hulk, the Fantastic Four, and the XMen—has undergone its own dramatic transformation over the past six years. Nor is it surprising that Marvel has an IT superhero operating behind the scenes of the media conglomerate. Senior Vice President and CIO Glenn Magala came to Marvel in 2006 with a single goal: to transform Marvel's IT approach from a siloed, tactical operation to one that favors collaboration and strategy. And with the help and support of executives across the business—from Publishing, Studio, and Licensing to Human Resources and Finance—he's on his way to doing just that.
Tales of Adventure Founded in 1939 as pulpy Timely Publications, Marvel grew during the post-war years into a comic book publishing powerhouse, creating many of the legendary characters that grace the big screen today. Indeed, Marvel's indelible mark on global popular culture extends well beyond the Hollywood blockbuster. Besides broadening the influence of pulp and comic publishing (and creating some legends along the way), Marvel's more than 5,000 characters appear as toys, apparel, video games, screen savers, cell phone wallpaper, TV shows, and more. Despite the company's obvious influence and success, in the late 1990s Marvel was facing challenges— ensnared as it was by complicated long-term licensing deals and a reorganization in bankruptcy court. Marvel was still in possession of some of the most-recognizable characters in popular culture, however, and ultimately a change of ownership reinfused the company with energy and focus. Within a few short years, Marvel relaunched several of its most popular titles, digitized its back catalog for release on the internet, negotiated new and lucrative licensing deals, and created a movie studio to directly capitalize on the opportunities that film presented for the company's properties under a unique financing structure. Early in this period of dramatic change, Marvel invested in Oracle E-Business Suite Financials to manage corporate finances—and ultimately manage the company's increasing receipts. But before the system began processing the financial results of Marvel's turn-of-the-millennium renaissance, the system simply churned away, handily processing Marvel's payables and receivables but bringing little added value to the business. Indeed, with only one exception, the data collected and created in the lines of business (LOBs) was not connected to Marvel's core financial information—preventing managers outside the finance department from gaining new insight and useful business intelligence. Mostly, LOB information was combined with financial
data only during Marvel's quarterly close, a process that manageers realized was too time and labor intensive. "Marvel had much of the information it needed to successfully run the business," says Magala, who was hired for his experience with Oracle and in the media and entertainment industry. "But we didn't connect our systems together to get new forms of insight and intelligence about the business." When he arrived, Magala began the process of leading Marvel through an adventurous—and ambitious—IT transformation that Marvel executives feel will give the company a strategic advantage in the media marketplace.
A Cultural Transformation Only months after Magala's arrival at Marvel, he delivered to management a comprehensive IT strategy—a business/IT road map—that shifted Marvel's focus away from projects that were priorities for his department—increasing company bandwidth, database performance tuning, and the like—and toward delivering solutions that more directly addressed the needs of his end users. To do this, he promoted an evolution toward a single datasource for the company, using business applications that facilitated—not prevented—collaboration among the lines of business. In sum, he was asking Marvel management to demand more-strategic value from information technology. "IT is a tactical organization by nature," says Magala. "But there's that critical need to lay out the strategy so those tactical moves are part of an overall strategy." A key ingredient for Magala was the right level of engagement and input from Marvel's lines of business. Internally, Marvel is really a collection of businesses that organize around the profitable use of the company's intellectual property—the characters that are known throughout the world. The publishing division is in charge of handling the comic books and other publications focusing on the Marvel Super Heroes— development, printing, and distribution—which requires a very different set of business functions than putting the characters to work in the movie studio or third-party video game licenses. The lines of business serve Marvel well in the twenty-first century, expanding net income and the value of the Marvel brand since the shakeup during the previous decade. So any changes in IT operations had to enhance performance in the lines of business, not upset it. And the business heads were aware of this tension. But Ken West, Marvel's executive vice president and CFO, found his initial resistance softened by the skill and responsiveness of Magala's team. "Having suffered along with little integrated automation for a number of years—despite being principally an Oracle shop—I was highly skeptical," West recounts. "But Marvel's current IT department stands so far above the teams we had over my six-year tenure at Marvel. Proper technical backgrounds were brought onboard— each with a can-do client service attitude. Town hall meetings were conducted to gain insights into how to best automate, and we've been on a tear to improve accountability and integrate disparate data ever since." This relationship was deepened by Magala's respect and service to the business needs of his users. "We have some very talented people here," Magala says. "But they needed help from an IT perspective. And as the relationship between IT and the businesses grew stronger, we gained a better understanding about what the users need. From there, moving the project forward became a very unified process."
X-Ray Enterprise Visibility Combining Marvel's existing Oracle footprint and the business/IT road map, Magala set his team to work on a full slate of projects designed to deliver strategic value to Marvel's business. Some of these projects leverage enterprise best practices—such as human resources, finance, and standard project accounting— while others are designed to fit the specifics of Marvel's unique business demands. This flexibility was possible due to Magala's insistence that Marvel work toward a single datasource built on a unified data model. While it will take time to identify, merge, and unify all of Marvel's existing data, it is a critical effort that is at the core of Magala's plan—improving data accuracy while putting actionable intelligence in the hands of employees. "One of the goals I'm working toward is reducing the time to market of our data," says Magala. "This will provide new data-mining capabilities and new visibility to information the verticals can't currently get easy access to." And while the data set is still evolving, the user interface—an intelligence dashboard that allows users to get information specific to their job function—is already delivering new value to end users. Magala uses a common Marvel report—customer aging—as an example of new enterprise intelligence that wasn't available
a year ago. Without that report readily on hand, it was difficult for the finance operation to quickly assess which customers were in good standing and which invoices had aged past their due date—an important bit of information for any company that expects to get paid on time. In the past, someone in IT would have to write an aging report, collect data from different parts of the enterprise (sometimes sitting in a spreadsheet on an employee's computer), dissect the data, and output it in ways that the end user could use. By the time that process was done, the data, which could have been inaccurate in the first place due to the multiple sources, was likely out-of-date—a delinquent customer could have paid an outstanding bill in the interim, for example. But this process has already changed. "Now we provide real-time dashboards to the company," says Magala. "So when people are looking for customer aging data, the time to market is immediate and the data is refreshed on a daily basis." Simon Jacobson, senior research analyst at AMR Research, believes that having enterprise systems built on modern platforms and delivered with the promise of being a single version of truth for all corporate data is critical for any growing company—but it's especially important for a complex media company with intense digital rights and intellectual property management demands. "It's deep waters if you don't have the appropriate systems to measure and track what you're doing," Jacobson says. "But if you have a very secure database and a secure content management system—one that allows users to filter and search for what they are looking for—then it becomes a somewhat easier proposition to manage that intellectual property. Much better than having that information live on everyone's individual PC or in a file cabinet." Rob Steffens, Marvel's senior vice president of analytics and strategic planning, is already seeing an improvement in this regard. "Today, I have access to some of the information I need at my fingertips, and I have confidence that we're moving in the right direction," he says. "In 2005, gathering operating-level information was time consuming and often generated data I had little faith in." Intellectual property management is perhaps one of the most important functions of Marvel's IT systems. The company is understandably protective of its properties, and great efforts have been made to protect the characters from any use that falls outside of company practice or standing licensing agreements. All content created by Marvel or its licensees—be it a comic book, toy, or Hulk bed sheets—is submitted to the company's brand assurance system, built on Oracle's Stellent content management system. Whenever a new deal is cut with a licensee, the new partner is given access to the approved character elements through Marvel's brand assurance system. Over the course of production, the licensee submits its designs to Marvel to ensure that the product complies with contract terms, matches the original description the licensee provided to Marvel, and is in compliance with Marvel's strict brand and creative requirements. With more than 5,000 characters to manage (some with multiple costumes), an effective brand assurance system drastically reduces the hours Marvel's brand strategy group spends vetting all third-party licensed products. If an issue arises, both Marvel and the licensee are automatically alerted, and automated workflow makes sure the product continues to move through the licensed product approval process. In fact, new products are rechecked as they move from concept to prototype to final product design—and only then does the system approve the licensee's right to manufacture. But workflow management is not the only benefit the brand assurance system brings to Marvel. It also provides the capability to marry earned royalty data for approved products to unapproved SKUs. With information about Marvel's extensive and complex licensing deals flowing through Stellent, Magala is also capturing valuable metrics about how the business operates. That data, combined with data generated by other parts of the business—say, Finance or Publishing—gives Marvel's executives the power to see the business in ways they couldn't before. "Business intelligence is the only way we can, collaboratively, bring that information together," says Magala. "This gives us a cross-sectional view of the licenses we issue, what a licensee has done with that license, and how that deal has performed over time. Information like that is built from data collected from the Oracle ERP [enterprise resource planning] portfolio."
Superpowered Business Intelligence For Magala, dealing with Marvel's growth extends beyond improving existing applications for the lines of business. In the case of Marvel Studios, the company's television and film production division, it meant creating new solutions where none previously existed. Historically, accounting for film and television has been done in standalone systems, managed by vendors that specialize in the unique demands of studio production. While these systems are very good at project accounting, they don't deliver the kind of real-time business intelligence that Marvel demands. Magala created a process for importing production data from the third-party system into the Oracle Projects software running at Marvel. By using Oracle Discoverer and Oracle Business Intelligence, project managers at Marvel could analyze the data at their convenience, instead of having to contact the external vendor and request a report. According to Magala, this capability becomes even more valuable over time. Once Marvel has enough historical data in place to serve as a baseline for performance indicators and benchmarks, executives at Marvel headquarters will be able to assess individual studio budget performance in real time. Accountants will be able to look at the historical cost of labor at any production stage to see if a given project is under or over budget. They will also be able to compare data on ongoing productions to project future costs and allocate available resources needed to complete each production on time. "We can get that kind of information from individual production applications," says Magala. "But someone has to cobble it together manually. Soon, we'll be getting a consolidated view of the cost structures and investments across all of our productions."
IT Heroics Two years after arriving at Marvel, the company's IT Iron Man is still restless. His systems are more efficient and users are getting better performance and new insight out of the applications they use. The company as a whole has embraced strategic IT and continues to embrace Oracle's view of fully integrated enterprise technology. But that is not enough for Magala. "We have delivered collectively and collaboratively to help improve the company over the past two years," he says. "As time goes on, the visible improvement and real deliverables accomplished have definitely proven that the strategy is solid and deserves the support that it gets." Magala's peers in the lines of business mirror his confidence. Dan Buckley, Marvel's president of Publishing, says the move to strategic IT is not only making his team more efficient but allowing them to focus on creating quality content for readers. "The publishing group is very excited about this because it will make us less dependent on the institutional knowledge held by a few staff members," Buckley says. "Ultimately it will allow our storytellers and editors to focus on creating product." But Magala always has an eye on the future. "We're halfway there," he says. "But I don't think IT is ever done. My goal is that embracing strategic IT will lead to business opportunities that will drive new initiatives."
