April 22, 2008

Pipeline Profile: Steve Fox

The CIO Perspective

Title: VP Digital Services and Information Technology, Cable One

Broadband Background: Steve Fox is vice president of digital services and information technology for Cable One.

The CIO perspective of our industry is one that most of us seldom see. In an effort to correct that, CT is publishing IT Executive as a supplement to the May issue. In it, Steve Fox is joined by CIOs from cable operators large and small to programmers and vendors. IT Executive should be hitting your inboxes next week; in the meantime, here's a taste of what you can expect to find inside. - CT

Cable CIO descriptions vary widely, from company to company. What in a nutshell is yours?

For our company, I do think we're a bit different. At Cable One, anything and everything digital/IP are within the realm of the CIO. Technically we do not have the CIO title, but my role fulfills it and other duties. This covers not only internal support, but also all new products as well. The various departments within my area of responsibility are traditional IT, billing services, digital video, high-speed data, phone and NOC.

What aspect of your job do you find the most challenging? The most rewarding?

Having a diverse role and wide range of responsibilities is not only challenging, but rewarding as well. Finding a solution that fits within our integrated solutions and seeing it work is by far the most rewarding.

How has CableOne's launch of telephony shifted your IT job description?

It has not shifted it a bit as it was always part of my job.

What would you include in a list of distinctly MSO-specific IT requirements?

The biggest one for me would be cross-product/cross-platform integration.

For several years, there's been an effort to get individual services out of their individual silos and into a more unified whole. Do you see this actually happening? If so, how has it affected your job?

With our setup, we do not have silos. Having this all under one person eliminates silos and thus the replicate positions it creates. This standardized approach is key to driving toward our low cost operational position.

Do you see other silos (billing, provisioning, CSR) that need to be combined?

Billing and provisioning are already under our standard approach and within my area of responsibility. One area our company is focusing on this year is CSR operations and how to make it more efficient. We have done this in the technical operations area and continue to work on it, but the front office has been overlooked.

What are the biggest challenges involved in working with OSSs and BSSs?

The biggest challenge for us is change management. Having these highly integrated systems has forced us to increase our use of lab/test/staging environments so we can regression test any and all changes before going to production.

What are some of the trickier IT challenges involved in offering business services as opposed to residential?

From a technology standpoint, this is not really a big issue. We wrestle with people and process more than anything else. We feel in order to support this type of customer, our level of expertise needs to increase as the demands made by a business are greater than residential. You are no longer dealing with an end user, but the local business IT department.

Various types of test equipment can report data from the field back to a central database. Are there any particular pitfalls incorporating that data into a larger OSS?

We feel that if the information is presented correctly, there is no such thing as too much information. If there is something that will allow our service associates to resolve an issue quicker, we will try to get that too them. It is all about first call resolution.