Interview with Jonathan Hiller, San Francisco Chronicle

Background

Taos: Tell us a little about the company and your part of the organization.

Jonathan: The San Francisco Chronicle is the leading newspaper in the Bay Area; we are part of the Hearst Corporation, the sixth largest privately held media company in the world. The Hearst Corporation owns 12 daily newspapers and 28 television stations across the country, reaching about 17% of all U.S. households. They are also one of the world’s largest monthly magazine publishers.

The Chronicle was started in the 1800’s — we currently have a circulation of approximately 500,000 daily and 550,000 on Sundays. There are about 1800 employees at the newspaper, 450 of which are in editorial. We have a production department that manages three printing plants, one in Richmond, one in Union City and one here in San Francisco. The plants are all remote to our editorial offices in San Francisco. We also have news bureaus throughout the Bay Area, and in Sacramento, Washington D.C. and Southern California.

We have 60 people working in IT at The Chronicle. Our primary focus is to get the paper out and maintain our production schedules — we call it the daily miracle. We also work to help the paper evolve its technology and improve service to customers and advertisers.

Taos: In terms of mobility in this workforce, I’d imagine especially your journalists, what technology are you supporting?

Jonathan: Laptops, blackberries and satellite phones mainly. The web has made our lives a lot easier because we have a web-based editorial front-end that allows our journalists to enter their stories from anywhere. If they can get to the web, they can get to us; and if they can’t we revert to older technology – they call or fax in the story.

Today’s Support Model

Taos: Tell us about how you have your end-user support model structured today.

Jonathan: We have centralized our helpdesk with five desktop support individuals supporting 1800 users. This team is responsible for the end-to-end support, including specific application support. Almost all of their work today takes place desk-side. We cover a lot of ground with a small and heavily used team.

We also employ technical liaisons in each department, which helps a lot. These individuals have other roles within the departments and have been trained to handle typical issues that come up, like frozen applications and printer resets. The liaisons are generally the first point of contact and they escalate to the helpdesk team as necessary.

Taos: How do you support remote workers if the problem is of a break/fix nature, where physical hands on the system are needed?

Jonathan: We dispatch a tech to the location, or depending on the location we might dispatch a local contractor we work with.

Taos: And very little of your support today includes remote management?

Jonathan: Very little today. We’re just getting started. For example, we push out patches for Microsoft remotely and were able to change privileges in access levels remotely. We are currently implementing a centralized desktop management system that will allow us to do much more remotely.

The Near Future

Taos: So moving to the future, what is your vision for how you see the workplace changing?

Jonathan: Right now, I’m not focused as much on changing technology in the hands of the end-user, but in how we support the technology they already have. My current focus is moving as much as I can to a remote management and support model. Time is money as they say, and having a user call in a ticket to a liaison, who then dispatches it to a tech, who then puts it into a queue, and then takes the time to go to the desk-side to spend anywhere from 10 minutes to 5 hours working on an issue is all very inefficient. The company is getting very little value for that effort.

Our solution is not only doing more remotely, but also having the first contact with an issue be with a higher skill set. Rather than escalating the issue as it gets more serious, we address it with skilled professionals from the start. As part of this project, we will set up a call center and have our desktop support people handle the calls. They will have headsets and they will be able to immediately take over the PC, see what is going on, fix it and get that person off the phone and back to work.

Taos: Who will handle break/fix?

Jonathan: My same team will continue to do that, but break/fix represents less then 10% of all tickets. Right now the other 90% is happening desk-side too. It’s that 90% which we are targeting.

Taos: And does this change the liaison role?

Jonathan: I think the need for liaisons will still exist — there is still a lot of hand holding going on with technology just because of the complexity of our applications and Windows.

In terms of the helpdesk team, we have historically been understaffed. I don’t expect to reduce staff, but rather grow more slowly and have better utilization of their time — we can minimize the wheel reinvention that can happen when you are just managing the day-to-day fires.

Taos: What technology will you be using to facilitate remote management and support?

Jonathan: First of all we put as much as we can of our custom functionality to support our business into a web-application model so we can it manage centrally — this addresses many of the problems encountered with fat-clients. However, in terms of managing general workplace productivity applications and system software, we will be using a product called iCommand. It was developed by OnTechnology and was recently purchased by Symantec. We had evaluated a couple of different products in this space. We did an on-site proof-of-concept implementation for several of them. I don’t want to mention any names but I can say based on their demos and product literature, they looked great on paper, but when we actually did the proof of concept, we determined that there were all kinds of deficiencies and inadequacies that were somewhat unique to our environment. For instance, we still run some NT4, Windows 2000 and Windows XP; and some systems couldn’t support this mix. We also have Mac to deal with.

iCommand is expected to be a tremendous help — it will allow us to automate rollouts of new versions of Windows, manage desktops remotely, deploy patches, and even help to reduce the Chronicle’s energy bill by allowing us to apply updates after the power on process (we currently keep most desktops powered on so we can apply security patches remotely).

Taos: There are risks with this model too, in particular what is your concern around security or something going wrong with a mass deployment?

Jonathan: Yes, automated processes that could update every PC on our network will have inherent risks — testing and change control will be key. From a security standpoint, there are built-in safeguards to the product, but it will be necessary to limit access to the system.

Taos: And what do you see as the opportunities for asset tracking through a remote management model?

Jonathan: That’s really a good question. With 1800 desktops, asset management is a big deal. With a remote management system I can dynamically run a discovery process on the backend and correlate this with the asset management inventory database that we manage when equipment first comes in. If you were to leave the company and your PC gets allocated to someone else, we will be able to see that, which will make management of assets much more exacting. To me, a lot of this is back to the future, back to the old mainframe model of central management.

Taos: What about moving increasingly to a standard office application environment? Are you doing that as well?

Jonathan: We have a standard ghost image that includes most of the applications employees need. It works, but is inefficient and expensive. With the new system, we can dynamically load a standard configuration based on the group they are in — if they don’t need the software it won’t be loaded. Most people don’t have the ability to install a program, except on older versions of Windows using the Web. However, if they do, we will be able to detect it.

Taos: You said earlier that you expect that moving to a remote management and support model will allow your team to grow more slowly, can you talk about that a bit?

Jonathan: I see a trend toward IT staff sizes getting smaller because the infrastructure is becoming better integrated and standardized. Today I have an IBM Main Frame, Unix, Windows and Mac. So we have these islands of technology that require specialized support staffs. We are moving toward a standardized environment in general, not just for the desktop. So for example, we are using Oracle as our database, UNIX as our backend operating system, Microsoft as our workplace platform, and Crystal as our report writer. This, combined with the increasing management I can do remotely both for the desktop as well as the backend infrastructure, means that over time I am going to need fewer people to manage the environment. This will ultimately reduce our cost and improve our efficiencies.

Taos: And you don’t see mobility adding complexity to this plan what with increased demands for laptops, remote access, a wireless office, and a variety of more sophisticated mobility tools (PDAs, smart phones, etc.)?

Jonathan: The manufacturers are doing a pretty good job of delivering mobility solutions. Our reporters use laptops with wireless access — they go to Hot Spots like Starbucks to upload photographs and stories. We have yet to deploy wireless in our own building, but plan to next year. Blackberry’s have helped a lot — not too long ago, everyone seem to want a laptop, now employees and especially executives have discovered that a blackberry is much more compact and provides most of the functions they need. But for those that do need remote access, we use several tools, including VPN and a service called FiberLink, which provides a local dial-up number for our road warriors.

Taos: Do you see a cultural challenge in terms of moving away from the desk-side manner your user base is accustomed to?

Jonathan: That’s a good question. We may discover through this process that people are getting a level of attention that they consider to be very valuable. But the rationale is there to move the support more behind the scenes if we are going to grow or even maintain while continuing to be responsible with our spending. I really must take advantage of the opportunities — I have to be more efficient in my operation.

Taos: What sort of things are you going to do to enable self-sufficiency in end-users?

Jonathan: We have a website that we direct people to — it provides tips for computing, frequently asked questions, things like that. Also, we provide in-house training on our standard office productivity tools. And with custom applications we provide a lot of training. For example, new staff in Circulation has a multi-week orientation process before they start answering the phones.

Taos: And when you implemented these types of programs and these tools did you notice a decrease in the need to have your support technician playing a training role as opposed to troubleshooting role?

Jonathan: You know we are really in that process now; we just recently started capturing why people are calling. And, what we are discovering is that even with all the training we have in place today over half the calls are educational in nature. We’ll have to continue to narrow down the training issues and develop targeted end-user training to address the reasons people are calling.

Taos: As you move to day-to-day support further away from the user are you also going to move greater subject matter expertise into these different lines of business within your operation to spend time with various departments talking about how technology can service them, what challenges there are having, and where patterns are in the problem they are experiencing?

Jonathan: Yes. That’s really where the value of IT should be. The efficiencies I can gain in backend support will help me drive increasing focus toward being a partner in solving my company’s business problems. We want to put more emphasis on the types of projects that will make the business more effective and which can drive revenue.

Taos: So how did you come up with your strategy for better management of the workplace environment as a means to support your ultimate goals for the focus of your operation?

Jonathan: It’s been an evolution. I’ve been here 17 years, so I have seen a lot of changes and as demands have grown we’ve had to respond intelligently to keep up or we’d perish. It’s almost been that clear. So we had to find the best technology available to do the job. And it seems like technology becomes available just as you need it. We are evolving and the industry is evolving tremendously at the same time.

Taos: What is your time frame for moving to the remote support and management model you have laid out?

Jonathan: We hope to be up and running by the end of the second quarter of next year. There will of course be a process of shaking out any bugs and unknowns that we hadn’t considered, but I would say 2005 would be the year of transitioning to centralized support.

Taos: Any advice to others out there who are looking to move to a centralized support model?

Jonathan: Yes, I think you have to ask yourself what is the primary value that your IT group is providing to your company. For us, traditional desktop support provides little value; it isn’t a differentiator or revenue generator. You need to get more creative and efficient there so you can add more value where it really counts – being a partner to your business.

Also, as you bring in technology to help, make sure you actually test it in your environment. You’re probably only going to get one shot at this and you want to get it right. The first impression is very, very important, so do your homework.