May 20, 2008

Pipeline Profile: Andy Baer

The CIO Perspective

Title: CIO, Comcast

The CIO perspective of our industry is one that most of us seldom see. In an effort to correct that, CT published IT Executive as a supplement to our May issue. In it, Hatfield is joined by CIOs from cable operators large and small to programmers and vendors. To read them all in their entirety, click here. - CT

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

It's actually pretty simple. This is the way Steve Burke described it to me: My job is to help the company use technology strategically.

How closely are you linked to other engineering executives?

Very closely. I understand that has not been common in the past. In fact, I was recently at a conference where several MSOs were present, and that question came up. All of us have moved to various degrees, but toward much closer relationships across all of technology organizations. In Comcast, that means network technology, product technology, customer care technology and information technology.

Like your colleague John Schanz, you hail from AOL. What lessons did you bring from Northern Virginia to Philadelphia?

I was only with AOL for about 16 months, but worked in the Northern Virginia technology corridor for a lot of years. One lesson is that there are diseconomies of scale with technology projects. Meaning that if you let a project get too large, it actually starts getting less productive. You have to be able to decompose projects into small components and have relatively small teams working on each of those components because if you let a project get too large, it can collapse on itself. I also brought a lot of service oriented architecture (SOA) concepts with me. Not that they hadn't already been started at Comcast, but a lot of our programs are following SOA approaches.

You also have telco experience. Have the lines blurred between these industries, or do you think that MSOs have a distinct set of IT requirements?

They are very blurry, but also similar across the entire industry of converged communications providers. The mix is different. Our video mix is higher than an RBOC's video mix, but we all have almost the exact same components. The only real difference, and that will probably change over time, is at the enterprise. We're certainly more on the residential and small business vs. the enterprise business. Verizon and other telcos have a mix of both.

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

The quality of service requirements that we have for business and the level of support from a customer care perspective are certainly somewhat different than what we have from a residential perspective. Those are probably the biggest things. Another is from a marketing perspective. The offers that we put together and the way we sell are different.
 
What is the role for technology consultants in the MSO world?

This is one thing where I may be different than some of my other colleagues at other organizations, but this is something where John Shantz and I see eye to eye. MSOs traditionally have given contractors wide authority and latitude to implement programs within our infrastructure. We are now flipping that model. What I've always said within my scope is that I have to take responsibility for overall architecture. My employees and I have to take responsibility for overall program management.

There will continue to be a role for others, whether large integrators or boutique contractors, because we will always have projects where it doesn't make sense to hire full-time employees. There will always be room and a place for contractors, both small and large, but the control model is changing a bit.

Convergence - is this happening, and how has it affected your job?

It is happening. It is a major focus in my organization because the more silos we have, the more challenge we have offering our customers a truly converged experience, both from product perspective as well as a customer service perspective. So we have to bring those silos together. The other challenge is in providing the management information we need across our product lines. We are in the process of bringing that together both from the customer's perspective as well as from an internal database perspective, which will supply the management information. It's a challenge certainly not just in Comcast, but also across all MSOs, based on how these systems grew up over time.

And is billing part of that mix?

Absolutely. But billing is a loaded word. Customer care, order management, provisioning, work force management, billing, collections - all of those are often referred to as billing, but they're really separate components. So first of all, you have to define billing. But the short answer is yes, we do have billing silos and more in the charging engine and less in some of those other areas. But our strategic architecture lays out the model for removing the silos across all those components. I think of it as the new trend into more modern terminology using business support system (BSS) components and the operational support system (OSS) components. What we've done is laid out a strategy about how all those components come together in a single architecture across both BSS and OSS.

Various types of test and monitoring 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've actually just gone through a fairly successful program to roll out a new integrated tool, which brings together all trouble management into a single portal. Previously our agents, both our technicians and our call center agents, had 15 to 20 different tools that they independently had to go into to look at various health checks. Now we have a single integrated set of tools. It's one portal where agents can get not just a home health check, but also a complete proximity neighborhood and network check.