Belo
The Business
From its beginning as a newspaper company founded in 1842, through the explosive growth of the past 20 years, Belo attributed success to a unique understanding of, and commitment to, the audiences it serves. Belo’s close community ties, strong journalistic reputation, and intense regional focus have been nurtured and expanded over time, resulting in powerful media brands and business opportunities that are not easily duplicated by competitors.
Today, a Fortune 1000 company with 7,800 employees and $770 Million in revenues, this media giant owns 20 television stations in such markets as Dallas/Fort Worth, Houston, Seattle/Tacoma and Phoenix, reaching 14 percent of U.S. television households; four daily newspapers, with a combined readership of 2.1 million daily and 2.7 million Sunday; two regional cable news channels reaching 3.6 million households; and 34 Web sites, including some of the nation’s most popular local and regional news sites.
Challenges
Like most media companies, Belo desired to better understand customer needs and wishes across all their publications. Clearly, this is a difficult task because not all customers subscribe to or watch the same programming even in the same metropolitan area. Belo needed a way to accurately identify an existing subscriber to one of their newspapers, for example, and offer them a special marketing campaign for that paper’s on-line Web site. Moreover, Belo wanted to ensure they could rapidly provision a new subscriber or user of an on-line service in a secure and reliable manner.
Belo identified six primary challenges to be solved:
2. Security risk management – Document and maintain “who has access to what” vital to securing enterprise data, networks and applications.
3. Cost reduction – Automated identity management products cut costs as a result of needing fewer resources to manage security and less Help Desk staff for the reduction of calls.
4. Improved service levels – Internal service level agreements (SLAs) with call centers or IT services increasing in complexity but with reduced budgets. Automation helps to maintain or improve SLAs.
5. Auditing Process – Very distributed account management strategy across thirty-seven (37) business units.
6. Reporting Process – Information technology and data access reporting performed typically on an individual system and on an ad hoc basis.
Our Solution
Partners Consulting’s Solutions Division, (formerly CPSG) quickly evaluated a group of software infrastructure components already owned by Belo and developed an identity Management roadmap for implementation across all subscriber provisioning systems. Additionally, the project team engineered a set of reusable software components that were used to aggregate subscriber’s information into Belo’s on-line publications. This allowed a customer of a print publication immediate access to the on-line version.
The roadmap outlined a three-phased strategy focused on preparing the infrastructure to meet these Business, Security, Auditing and Reporting needs.
Phase I – Reengineering of the Identity Repository - Corporate Directory
Phase II – Implementation of Role Management in Financial ERP System
Phase III – Product Selection and Business Justification for Implementation of a User Provisioning and Auditing System
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