Avengers, Assemble!

Continued

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process was done, the data, which could have been inaccurate in the first place due to the multiple sources, was likely out-of-date—a delinquent customer could have paid an outstanding bill in the interim, for example.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.