Disney CIO Aiming To Move IT Costs Down With Enterprise Initiatives

"What I am looking at is the total IT costs for the entire company," said Michael Tasooji, who is also the senior vice president of corporate information services. "As long as I am pushing that down, I am creating value for the Walt Disney Co., then I am doing my job. I am going to let our finance and tax accountants worry about who pays how much at business units. So we are moving the needle down at a companywide level."

Tasooji's comments came during a CIO panel session with other Disney IT executives.

Tasooji said the allocation of costs and budgets continues to be sources of tension with individual units as he moves forward with enterprisewide initiatives.

Roger Berry, senior vice president and CIO of IT for Walt Disney World, agreed and conceded that initially the enterprisewide initiative was "difficult."

"I think it kind of dawned on all of us that we are businesspeople," Berry said. "We are not just IT people. We realized that we were underleveraging the skill of Disney dramatically by having independent activities that were like across the company, and so we decided it was our responsibility as the IT leaders to leverage that."

When Tasooji became CIO of Disney in May 2000, the company had 24 business unit CIOs executing over 1,000 projects, supporting over 4,000 systems and sourcing products and services from over 1,300 technology vendors.

Disney is currently in the process of going through a major IT initiative that involves putting the entire company's back-office operations including human resources and finance on a single global enterprise implementation of SAP ERP software.

Tasooji said that nine-month rollout has resulted in what SAP is calling the fastest global SAP implementation ever. "We are right there in the middle of the action, and we are expected to execute," he said.

Tasooji said that "front-of-house" business initiatives such as CRM continue to be hard to justify on an enterprise level. Nevertheless, there is an "enterprise aspect of CRM" that Disney is undertaking that "is going to be difficult."

Currently, the company in the middle of the enterprise-wide initiative with about four shared services being implemented. Each of the shared services has performance and service level measurements.

Disney, for example, has established an enterprise portal architecture, said Tasooji, that included a standard technology stack for business-to-employee and business-to-business portal application development. "That has been so successful that the subscription to the service has by far surpassed our expectation," Tasooji said. "That practice rolled out and the type of capabilities that brings to the table is changing the paradigm for application development."

Previously, Berry's Disney group had two activities in the portal area that were going in different directions, he said. "We brought the world team together with the corporate team and said we can do this in a consolidated way, and we saved $10 million right out of the gate," he said.

One of the keys was communicating the "value that the whole is better than any individual" effort, said Berry. "The key is to bring all these things together in a way to deliver an experience you couldn't do individually."

Tasooji said some areas of disagreement with the business units as he moved forward with enterprise initiatives also center on "risk or tolerance for risk" in certain units. ESPN's IT unit, for example, has an "unbelievably controlled and secured" environment which must keep ESPN News and ESPN Sports Center up 24 hours a day seven days a week. If ESPN's IT staff "screws up, the screen goes blank," said Tasooji. "But that is really ingrained within the architecture and IT organization of ESPN. That is maybe a little bit too much integration for my taste."

As a result, Tasooji says, there is a tension between the need to bring the ESPN organization into the rest of the enterprise. "We have to relax some of the rigid rules and we are getting there," he said. ESPN has a "time line" for meeting certain initiatives, said Tasooji.

Tony Tamburo, senior vice president of management information systems for ESPN, said ESPN's mission of bringing realtime information to viewers with technology puts a lot of pressure on the IT department. He said he faced a big challenge in convincing the broadcast organization that ESPN was up to the task.

"Quite frankly, it was a challenge for me, I had to prove myself day by day to make the broadcast folks, my brethren, feel comfortable that I could handle that technology," he said. "They were tough. I had to prove that I was capable and I could deliver."

Tasooji began the enterprisewide initiative by bringing all of the Disney CIOs together for a meeting in August 2000. That was the start of an eight-month process of defining a companywide IT strategy. The initial strategy simply defined common definitions for products and services within the portfolio of IT.

Tasooji said the team categorized certain products and services as "non differentiated" with an aim toward standardizing them enterprisewide for a cost savings of about $130 million. The CIO team also agreed on products and services that needed to be at business units to drive operational efficiency.

There is another "narrow category" of "segment-level capabilities" that are common across segments such as the ABC network and ESPN. "And we feel those should be done at a segment level," Tasooji said.