IT Life: Keeping Sheffield Entertained

Sheffield International Venues runs 15 sports and leisure facilities including the Sheffield Arena, a 12,500 seater concert venue, as well as golf courses and smaller sports and entertainment centres.

SIV has 1000 staff and thousands of customers all wanting to make the most of their leisure time. ICT manager Michael Cook has a department of ten people, and the job of  engaging the customers and empowering the staff.

Not all the staff are big IT users – a lot are cleaners, life guards and grounds maintenance staff on the golf courses – so he has around  600 Exchange mailboxes to support. He also has a lot of scope to use new approaches such as mobility and social media, to keep the company in peak fitness.

IT is a hobby

How long have you done the job?
I’ve worked for the company for 20 years this year. My background was originally finance, and IT has always been a hobby. I’ve held the position of IT manager for just over 12 years.

Sometimes I still think its a hobby and it’s great to get paid for doing your hobby. Though nowadays there is a lot more management involved – more strategic stuff than fixing things and playing around with technology.

What’s been your favourite project in your work so far?
Sheffield City Hall is a Grade II listed building, and a 2,500 seater concert venue. It is the only oval hall outside London in the  whole of fhe UK, and about seven years ago we had a major refurbishment. We closed the building for about 18 months.

That was an exciting project, because it is a beautiful building.  The challenge was to get the site up to speed with technology, while being sensitive to the requirements of English Heritage.

You are allowed to do things that don’t affect the aesthetics of the buildings, so in some of the public areas, we could put large format LCD screens to use instead of traditional printed material – but running the cables was a bit of a challenge.

Wireless can help, but given the thickness of some of the walls, getting decent Wi-Fi signals was tricky. Below ground level there is a very large ballroom. We managed to get some decent Wi-Fi coverage there but mobile signals are very poor.

It is a concert venue, but we have a lot of exhibitions and conferences there. The delegates all have laptops, iPads, iPhones and whatever smartphoens and tablets they can possibly get. We’ve done a lot of work in the last couple of weeks to beef up the Wi-Fi, and I’m talking to mobile providers about increasing the mobile signals.

What tech were you involved with ten years ago?
We had quite chunky laptop devices, running NT4. We’ve always been a Microsoft organisation, which makes things a lot easier to support, but NT4, was stable, reliable and easy to manage. It’s  always seemed bizarrre to me why Microsoft replaced it with something like Windows XP.

I can’t remember my first mobile for work, but in those days there were Nokia devices geared for businesses. They were the workhorse of the mobile world.

Bring on the Minority Report interface

What tech do you expect to be using in ten years’ time?
I’m always interested in the latest thing , and a lot of the things we are looking at are about interaction with customers to improve the customers’ experience. That means more online marketing and sociai media, better understanding of what our customers want and tailoring our products to meet that.

In Minority Report, they deliver bespoke advertising specific to an individual as they walk down the street. Having the ability to identify a given person that is present on one of our sites, we could deliver advertising catered for that one individual and hopefully persuade them to spend a bit more money and time with us.

Our gym members have a membership card, and we get reports of their activity and attendance. Imagine, at the very second they walk into the building, getting a message directly to their smartphone saying “We know you like swimming and exercise classes. We’ve a new product, geared up to you exactly.”

Are there privacy objections? Just look at how some people play out their life on social media. You have got to the stage where people are almost born with a smartphone in hand and a Twitter and a Facebook feed. They like to tell people they have checked into a site, so why can’t we use that to our advantage?

Thank you Tim Berners Lee!

Who’s your tech hero?
Tim Berners-Lee, Where would we be without his invention, the Web? People can’t imagine life without the Internet. It is a massive repository of information. You can’t comprehend the depth of it. It is almost infinite.

I think he is a great advocate for openness. I’ve followed recent media coverage of the UK’s Digital Economy Act and its equivalent in the US [the ill-fated SOPA] , I understand there are copyright issues which are the underlying reason for it, but Tim is one of the campaigners to keep things open and to a certain extent anonymous.

Potentially measures like this could destroy the original objective of the Internet – to share information.

Who’s your tech villain?
At this stage, no one really. At one stage, I might have picked on Bill Gates for making a huge amount of money, but it is great to see what he is doing with his philanthropy. We all wish we’d put a few pounds behind Bill Gates.

What’s your favourite technology ever made?
It has to be the Kinect for XBox, I think it’s a great way forward for how humans interact with technology, not having to physically touch the device.

I think we’ll see some major developments in that area in a short space of time, with mobiles, smart devices and tablets. I read somewhere about consultant surgeons looking at Kinect-like technology for doing surgical procedures remotely.

Which do you use most?
My BlackBerry to be honest. RIM suffered a bit of a hit when they announced they are going to pull out of the consumer market and continue with business [it was a bit more complex than that], but I think for m the BlackBerry is a great business device.

It helps my work-life balance. I don’t have to be at my desk: with my BlackBerry and laptop I can be at work wherever I am.

I also like the Playbook, but whoever thought of the name Playbook needs shooting. It’s a completely misleading name for the device [and means nothing to people who don’t play American sports]. I like it because it is smaller and more portable than the iPad, but it does have clunkier apps.

The other day I did a presentation to some students doing an IT course. It was loaded on my BlackBerry and connected to an HD TV. I used the BlackBerry as controller. That’s a great move forward from having to plug a laptop in, and not go too far away from it, so you can keep hitting buttons.

Getting more value from partners

What is your budget outlook?
Our IT budget isn’t massive. When the credit crunch hit, IT and training were easy things to reduce. We’ve been under a lot of pressure to find quite significant savings and for the last couple of years, we have had no real increase.

I am trying to get better value out of what we are doing, by building better relationships with strategic partners. If we can’t save in certain areas, can we get more out of what we are paying for.

For instance, one partner makes our leisure management system, for bookings and PoS (point-of-sale) management. That company used to say “This is our software. This is the cost”. Now they want to engage with us in a more detailed level and tailor their software. That is a bigger benefit to us as an organisation, and it seems to be working well at the moment.

Apart from your own, which company do you admire most and why?
Apple. Steve Jobs was quite an arrogant person, but look at what he has achieved. Apple has been very quick to market with products, and caused real upsets. RIM and Nokia just failed to pick up on what Apple was doing.

They’ve got talent, they’ve come up with innovations, and pushed out to market very very quickly.

I have an iPad – when I can get my hands on it. I don’t get much access to it.

What’s the greatest challenge for an IT company/department today?
Consumerisation. People expect to use their iPads at work, I’m not against that; the challenge is making sure that our infrastructure is capable of enabling that to happen.

The good news is I don’t have to worry about hardware, but how do I give access to company data without compromising its integrity and security.

Cloud looks good so far

To Cloud or not to Cloud?
We are dipping our toe in the water. The system that sells tickets for entertainment facilities is externally hosted. It is responsible for processing £20 million per year.

We did that as a cost saving exercise, balancing the likely cost of upgrading our infrastructure to continue using the system, versus the cost of letting them host it for us and look after it for us.

It seems to be going OK, but there is an element where you feel you are losing a bit of control. When you can see the physical servers in your computer room, you can get access, and you know if a hard disk fails, you are in control and you can deal with it. If it’s externally hosted, you are relying completely on someone else, and  your role is to manage the relationship, the contract and the performance.

We’ve looked at moving other things, but decided to keep them in house. When we upgraded Exchange, I looked at going to the cloud for email, perhaps with Google. But then Google had significant outages, so now we want to keep this in house. We made an investment, upgraded our storage, virtualised with VMware and upgraded to Exchange 2010.

What did you want to be when you were a child?
A policeman or a fireman. I wanted to do something good for others, but I wear glasses and have done from a very young age. I wouldn’t have got far then, far without 20:20 vision.

As I was growing up what sticks out was the technology. I remember a few days before I was due leave school, they took the first delivery of BBC computers, and we were told to keep our hands off, they are for next year’s students.

I was intrigued about computers, and a friend bought a ZX80. The First thing we did was to take it apart and rebuild it, and then started with BASIC programming. From there I ended up going to night school three nights a week for a couple of years, doing COBOL programming. That’s what got me started.

So I’m not a fireman – but I’ve done lots of firefighting over the years.

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