“Town hall meetings were
conducted to gain insights Marvel well in the twenty-first century,
into how to best automate, expanding net income and the value
of the Marvel brand since the shakeup
and we’ve been on a tear during the previous decade. So any
to improve accountability changes in IT operations had to enhance performance in the lines of
and integrate disparate business, not upset it.
And the business heads were
data ever since.” aware of this tension. But Ken West,
—Ken West, Executive Vice President Marvel’s executive vice president
and CFO, Marvel and CFO, found his initial resistance
softened by the skill and respon-
siveness 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 inte-
grate 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.”
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
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.”
>>SNAPSHOT
Marvel Entertainment
www.marvel.com
Founded: 1939
Employees: 253
Revenue: US$485.8 million
Oracle products and services:
Oracle E-Business Suite, includ-
ing Financials, Human Resources,
Self Service HR, Manufacturing and
Incentive Compensation; Oracle
Business Intelligence Suite; Oracle
Configurator; Oracle Enterprise
Content Management Suite
(formerly Stellent); Oracle Insight
