Profit Magazine - May 2008

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was done, the data, which could have been inaccurate in the first place due to the multiple sources, was likely out-of-date—a delinquent customer could have paid an outstanding bill in the interim, for example.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

An Adventurous Partnership

Reducing the number of relationships that Marvel Senior Vice President and CIO Glenn Magala has with external software vendors is a core part of his strategic IT plan. Indeed, focusing on a handful of critical partnerships allows him to more easily deploy new solutions, provide feedback to the vendor organization, and influence future software functionality. Additionally, vendors with deep relationships with Marvel become more knowledgeable about the nuts and bolts of the company’s complex business operations—and therefore can recommend and build solutions that better serve Magala’s users.

“I organize my vendor relationships so I have a few of high quality,” says Magala. “When it comes to what’s going to have an impact on our business, those few high-quality relationships are key. I take pride in knowing that my team

is building these alliances.”

The Oracle and Marvel relationship is an excellent example of how a close customer/vendor partnership can benefit both parties. Oracle has had a technology footprint at Marvel for more than a decade, and the trust built between the two enterprises allows for close collaboration on new projects. Oracle representatives can invest their expertise into Marvel’s long-term strategy—answering questions about new products, briefing management on new technologies, and conducting assessments of how Marvel business processes map to its new IT footprint. And for Oracle, Marvel can serve as a model for other midsize and media and entertainment companies— lessons learned at Marvel are likely to apply to other customer sites.

One unique feature of the relationship will launch at the same time as Marvel’s latest Super Hero movie: Iron

Man. Marvel offered Oracle use of several Super Hero licenses to produce a short film that dramatizes the challenges the company has faced during its IT transformation and the solutions that Marvel has employed to overcome those challenges. This joint production allows Marvel to showcase characters from upcoming films through a nontraditional channel and gives Oracle a compelling and unusual way to present a customer case study.

This special project would not have been possible without Magala’s close partnership with this trusted vendor.

“I started this kind of relationship with Oracle a while ago, even prior to coming to Marvel,” he says. “I’m a big believer in what we are building together, what we’re doing for Oracle, and what Oracle is doing for us in return.“