From Invisible To Integral: The Changing Role of IT

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, Dec 15, 2000 by Jennifer F. Steil

As magazine publishing becomes increasingly technology-dependent, IT departments are playing a more critical role in everything from managing new property integration to fostering business and customer relationships.

Not long ago, magazine publishers' information technology departments were usually relegated to the back rooms, isolated from the rest of the company like so many pens in a pocket protector. Now that the magazine industry has become so highly automated, however, IT is emerging from the shadows to penetrate virtually all aspects of the business.

"We are not sitting blindly in the back cave anymore, but trying to become a partner with the business side," says Michael Mikos, chief information officer at CMP Media.

These days, IT is not just about editorial and production--it's becoming integral even to the most routine business aspects of a publishing company. It has its fingers in an increasing number of pies: hiring employees, paying travel expenses, distributing financial information, and helping various divisions communicate with one another.

"IT is taking on the role of communications enabler," says Scott Hall, vice president of information technology at Hanley-Wood. "One of our major projects for the next year will be to roll out a business-functional intranet where people can go to perform their daily jobs--writers can check out laptops, people can schedule conference rooms, get travel information and request HR information."

This increasingly central role is raising the status of IT people. "A lot of different departments in the company come to us on a regular basis for help and advice," says Anastasia Holdren, content strategist at Hammock Publishing. "We're constantly working with the art department to integrate new software and training. I've seen how our department has become more involved in the daily operations, even of the print side."

Tom Payne, information technology director for Emap USA, says that while IT groups have long been perceived as reactive people who hide behind closed doors and play with keyboards, perhaps no division has a better overview these days of how every piece of a company fits together. It's the only department that understands how every business process works, and how work flows throughout the organization. And, says Payne, it's changed his view of IT staffing needs: "The IT department is becoming more crucial. If we can bring into the department some people with business expertise, and so start to blur the edges between IT and the business, that would be great."

Jeffrey Fulton, technology director at Fortune, says he sees IT people increasingly becoming jacks-of-all-trades. "IT people are having to wear more hats," he says.

Mikos sees the IT department expanding its traditional production aspects to include customer relationship management as well. "The areas we concentrated on in the past--production aspects like fulfillment--are now typically being out-sourced to specialized companies," he says. "And we're looking at how to get closer to customers. We're an integral partner with business relationship managers.

Mikos agrees that IT is moving steadily into the business side of companies. "Understanding the fundamental commercial issues is crucial, as is ensuring that the infrastructure is positioned to support those initiatives and not impede them," he says.

NEW CHALLENGES

[greater than][greater than] Managing increased integration: Given the number of major mergers and acquisitions in 2000, it's not surprising that one of the primary challenges IT departments have been facing is the need to integrate new properties into the core company.

"Managing acquisitions has become a bigger and bigger part of our job, as the time people are willing to wait for an acquisition to be fully integrated is getting shorter," says Hall. "And the time they're willing to wait to start receiving back-end consolidation savings from an acquisition is getting shorter faster."

As a result, says Hall, IT is getting involved in the acquisition process at a much earlier stage to ensure that within a month after an acquisition, the company is on the network, has e-mail and is running on the accounting system.

Hanley-Wood has more than doubled in size in the past two years, primarily by acquisition. To accommodate this growth, Hall's IT budget and staff have both increased radically.

One goal of using technology is to achieve economies of scale, so if a company adds people to its IT department, it should be reducing the expense somewhere else to remain within budget, Hall says. "As we renew accounting systems, we don't have to have accounting staff at every location," he says. "It allows you to centralize. With an acquisition, that becomes key. The same thing happens to technology itself; you don't have to have systems at every location. So it's helping IT contain its own costs."

With all the changes going on in company size and information technology, sorting out the precise costs of an expanding IT department is impossible, IT directors say.