IT Life: Hello! Magazine – When IT Stops Saying No

In case there is anyone who hasn’t seen it, HELLO! Magazine is a weekly celebrity news magazine distributed in 100 countries. It has been published in the UK since 1988, and has an older sister publication called ¡HOLA! which has been published in Spain since 1944.

Jose Mosquera has been HELLO!’s head of IT for four years, supporting about 100 users, 70 of them in the London office. He has six IT staff looking after users in Madrid and London. In a varied 20 year IT career, he has put in spells at Apple and at an Internet service provider, most recently working in the public sector.

From No to Yes

What’s been your favourite project in your IT career so far?
I don’t have a single one but, taken as a whole, running IT at HELLO! has been a massive project – changing the way IT works in a company. It’s been a long process, but we are pretty much there.

A lot of little projects have added up to a change in the way IT is visualised. Before, it was mostly a backroom operation, support based. IT provided certain things and its job was to say ‘no’ to anything else.

We were seen as the ‘No Department’. I very much wanted to change that. We are here to provide a service, it is not about preventing users from doing things, it’s about seeing how new technologies and innovation can add value to the company.

Virtualisation is one of the key technologies that allow my department to say ‘yes’. Previously there were quite a lot of older servers. Virtual servers have reduced our costs and let us give a better service. It lets us make savings and use our financial resources in a better way.

We have 11 servers in total on our own premises, running Microsoft’s Hyper-V as our virtualisation platform. We have around 25 virtual servers, but that is set to grow. We have a couple of email servers off-site which we share with our sister company – we’re soon bringing those in-house.

We’ve also been introducing IT at the edges, so people who are out doing interviews and taking photos can get their pictures and reports back to the office. Our job is to allow them to do the job properly.

BYOD – a win-win situation

The company has been providing mobile phones for key users, but as the technology changed, why not allow other people to use their own mobile phones, as long as we can make sure our data is protected?

We are going through a bring your own device (BYOD) pilot. As we have tackled it, we are keeping an eye on the legalities, and we’ve tried to document all that and make it clear where the responsibilities lie. Insurance and upgrades are the responsibility of the user, and we provide a service – essentially email on your phone, with the corporate data sandboxed.

If anything happens to your phone, you give us permission to delete our data, and should you want us to, we can wipe your phone. If the phone does not meet our requirements, it gets blocked automatically and email stops coming. It’s very simplistic, but it’s best to approach it this way.

It is a pilot and we might be able to do more or tighten things up – or if we are legally on thin ice, we could take the thing away, and go back to the standard approach.

The response we have got from our users is very positive. They want access to the email, it is not the company pushing them. And key users still have devices from the company, some of them iPhones and iPads.

The key to all this is having the right IT staff. They have to be multi-skilled and multi-talented. We have Linux, Mac and Windows servers, virtualisation and open source systems. We have to deal with all of those… as well as simple support questions! IT staff have to be jugglers. You just cannot afford to be doing one thing all the time – but you have to control every single task properly.

The greatest change is that we are now seen as a fundamental part of the company. Media is a dynamic sector and very pressurised. We are always trying to find that edge that allows us to do better than other companies – IT people can bring a lot to the business, and IT has to be an active department.

From text to video

What tech were you involved with ten years ago?
Ten years ago I was overseas, working for an ISP startup – the first private ISP in Slovenia. We were trying to be technologically advanced, looking at things like bringing VoIP into the country, and building a city-wide Wi-Fi system.

When I started, I was doing Oracle. It was text based, with no proper graphics on the screen – in the good old days of the IBM PC.

What tech do you expect to be using in ten years’ time?
In ten years’ time being constantly connected will be part of life. Having access to the Internet all the time will be a normal thing. In the media we will use augmented reality for marketing and advertising purposes.

Video technologies will become commonplace, making it easy for people to work from home and have a real video conference from home.

Who is your tech hero?
No person in particular, but I respect companies that use their resources and money to push the boundaries of technology – innovating to create new markets.

The obvious one is Apple. It is a great innovator, and a great marketing company.

Google is perhaps more innovative, as they use their money to push the boundaries, to do things other companies have not thought about. For example, what they are doing with Google Glasses, or the driverless car, it’s exciting, the stuff of science fiction, and it is difficult to see how that integrates into Google’s strategy. They are looking so far ahead!

Who’s your tech villain?
Again, there is no person. There are certain things I don’t like about some companies. I dislike how a company can corner the market and charge more or less what they want, but I understand how it can happen.

What’s your favourite technology ever made? Which do you use most?
Right now I would say smartphones, just simply because I have so much information there with me all the time. I have all my corporate data, and all the other information I might want. I can see the time of the next train or bus – so when I leave the office I know the time I have to get to the station or the bus stop. I think that changes the way people live.

I was a big fan of the BlackBerry but now I am using Apple. BlackBerry is unfortunately not doing so well.

What is your budget outlook? 
It is flat, so right now, the challenge is to do more with a budget that remains the same, managing suppliers to try and get the most value for money you can get. Luckily as new technologies come in and systems and services develop, you have more room for negotiation, and there is a lot of competition amongst suppliers. It is a manageable challenge.

My company has a flat structure. If there is something that hasn’t been budgeted for, that would bring value, it is easy to put that across and get it authorised. That is a big contrast with the public sector, where you have a fixed budget and you have to spend it.

What’s the greatest challenge for an IT company/department today?
Consumerisation. You have to bring in new technologies and cloud services that users have in their normal life, that are marketed towards individuals and consumers –  and integrate them into the company.

Twitter and Facebook are examples of services which a few years back would have been prevented in most organisations. Now, they are both actively used by companies as part of their marketing strategy. The key is managing the information out-flow.

Content sharing sites that allow people to share images or videos are a concern for a media company. That is not going away – it is a question of how we manage that. Yes, we can block those services, but we could make use of them. If we take things away from users, we have to give them something they can use.

To Cloud or not to Cloud?
It depends. I have nothing against the cloud, but it depends on the service. You have to take each system on its merits. There are some things I wouldn’t dream of putting there, but with services like Gmail or Hotmail, everyone is on the cloud.

We have magazine planning software and if we were to put that in the cloud, I would be afraid. There are services that allow you do to the same thing in the cloud, but would I want that to be on someone else’s server? Our front page has to be confidential until the day of release.

What did you want to be when you were a child?
I wanted to be everything. When I was very young, I wanted to be a pilot, parachutist and a scuba diver all at the same time! At the time I didn’t even know how to swim, but as a kid you don’t constrain your ideas.

I have done all those things now – I used to go to Ipswich often to parachute and fly. The problem is the weather. If I lived in Florida I would probably be flying and parachuting more often.

I was born in Colombia, and came here when I was 15 or 16. Most of my adult life has been spent here and I’ve got a combination of the Latin and British temperaments.

It is great seeing all the changes in IT and I really look forward to what is coming in future. Beam me up Scotty!

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