Avengers, Assemble!

Continued

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."