System buyers shop around, then bag their own solutions

While the Perfect System has evolved, and shopping for it has changed as well, some things are immutable.

According to recent shoppers for hot technology, you can rip out entire chapters from the "Book of Systems Truths," but core values for The Perfect System are as firm as ever.

What are they? The Perfect System must be open, reliable, integrated, features-rich and adaptable.

All these requirements are the consequence of having lived in the client-server environment for much of the '90s. In the last 10 years, shrink-wrapped solutions taught newspaper technologists that software should be cheap, easy to learn and frequently updated. Quark XPress (which, actually, doesn't meet any of these three criteria) spread like kudzu, without newspaper-unique customization, proving that even editors accept functionality over familiarity.

Publishers have grown accustomed to standard platforms, standard command sets, standard interfaces, standard protocols. They have made life in Technoworld more ... standard. And that's a good thing.

They have brought with them object-oriented programming, interchangeable modules and interoperable software that can turn any system into Frankenstein's monster while making every information technology department an integration shop.

Telecommunications and the Internet prove that databases are for everyone, everywhere -- and for some shoppers, the database is the single most important item they'll buy.

And the future? As new media broaden every newspaper's mission, information technology managers are just beginning to tend multimedia warehouses and "information stores," enterprises far beyond yesterday's manufacturing and finance systems.

How have these changes in business requirements and expectations altered the buying landscape? Recent and future buyers might do well to cite one automaker's ad campaign:

The rules have changed.

Ageless desires, timeless mindset
Four key items continue to top the digital shopping list: open systems, standard platforms, seamless integration and robust suppliers.

What's changed?

"Proprietary systems are gone," said Bill Steigerwald, information systems director at the Fayetteville (N.C.) Observer-Times (58k, morning). The functionality that once was unique to one supplier or another has been replaced by a general-purpose product, such as Microsoft Word, which sees wide use in many industries.

Today, Steigerwald said, one supplier of advertising solutions "will give you any SQL database you want -- Sybase, Oracle, MS SQL -- you pick it, they'll put it on, because they're so similar. Everything's so open now. If you would have told me 10 years ago that we could do that today, I wouldn't have purchased anything. I would have waited 10 years."

Amid this openness, shoppers narrow their focus to particular brands, to simplify support, training, troubleshooting and upgrades. But those brands aren't newspaper-specific any more -- the Fayetteville paper prefers Microsoft's Windows NT operating system as its common denominator, while Media General of Richmond, Va., hews to Hewlett-Packard's UNIX and Windows NT in its initiative to centralize and standardize its technical side across its newspapers and broadcast stations in several states.

"It's easier to find nowadays more open solutions, particularly for newspapers," said Richard Shute, manager of technology for the New Media Group of Media General. Deviation from those open standards isn't forbidden, said Shute, but if his team is looking at a product that doesn't conform, "we have to have good justification for it."

This need for standardization is a reflection of a major change in how newspaper companies function now. With so many now owned by bigger companies, groupwide solutions are becoming more important than an individual paper's preferences.

Media General's Internet classified system installation is "a real challenge," Shute said, because of the differences between the classified ad front-end systems in use at the company's 21 daily newspapers. "Three or four have the same vendor's product, but very different releases."

That hinders extracting ads and news, and it's galvanized the company toward adopting universal standards.

The same is true in San Diego, where overall integration is more important than ever, said Janet Niehaus, information technology director of the San Diego Union-Tribune. "We do want everything to work together."

Echoed Jim Keary, Union-Tribune business systems manager: "Business requirements of newspapers now are such that everything needs to be integrated -- information has to flow more quickly and more smoothly" around the entire operation, going into places that before were isolated from one another.

That eliminates tossing data batches between subsystems, explained Rob Perschau, newsroom systems manager of the Kansas City Star. He seeks "extremely tight integration ... as much integration as we can get," to cut manual intervention and workflow blockages.

"Our overall goal is to come as close to an enterprise-wide publishing solution as we can," he said. "That's limited somewhat by what we already have, that we aren't going to change out, but for whatever we put in, we want it to be as tightly integrated and [open] as possible."

As with the shortcomings of Media General's multitudinous classified systems, the Star finds that its workflow halts where disparate systems are connected by push interfaces. The reporter writes a story, the editor edits it, sends it to the rim, and as soon as it leaves the rim for the page editor, the workflow ends.

"It's on the other side of the fence and there's no gate," Perschau said, and pagination begins another isolated workflow.

This mutual isolation is on his mind as he prepares for the future. Any new system must have "fluid, multi-way workflow," where a change in a story made by a page editor will show up on the reporter's front-end -- or a financial system will refresh all screens with each sale made by a clerk in the circulation department.

Systems must work with Macs or PCs, Perschau said -- but within one box or the other. "We want to eliminate the system of two computers on desks, which we have in 38 cases where editors have to edit and paginate."

Some rules haven't changed
Open standards have done away with proprietary software while opening the door to hardware concerns.

"I'm looking for reliable equipment," said Robert Rogers, vice president of operations at Media General. It must be fault-tolerant in function, and take less tending by increasingly scarce qualified technicians. With open standards, Rogers' needs can be met several ways.

"Tandem was a safe environment," said Steigerwald of the minicomputer that Sacramento-based System Integrators Inc. used to ensure nonstop operability in systems dating to 1980, "but there are other ways to put a system together that don't give you true fault tolerance, but they do let you sleep at night.

"We're putting together a series of DEC clusters, so users don't notice when one goes down."

Supplier reliability is another constant, a top criterion for Mike Steele, Media General's director of new media. He wants "someone that will be there next week"; the expansion into new media has made that a prickly issue.

"There's no guarantees there," quipped Shute. "In the Internet world, companies come and go so quickly, it's hard to predict who will be there next week" -- and so it seems with alliances and products among traditional suppliers.

"Now it's an alphabet soup of who's in business this year and who's filing for bankruptcy," said Rogers. "It makes us very nervous about the reliability of the companies we're purchasing from."

Those companies who pass muster on the reliability front have fewer bullets to dodge these days, in large measure because customers are demanding less than they used to.

Steigerwald explained: "In the past we used to dictate how we wanted systems to be, how we wanted them to act. After we got them, we really didn't want to use them that way. We pushed vendors beyond what" was necessary to provide customized solutions.

Now, IT managers seek less customization or product makeovers. Media General tries to minimize customization, Shute said, out of self-preservation.

"The more you customize, the more you get bit when the next release comes out," he said, so he looks for supplier-supported add-on tools instead of changes in a given product's code. And that means the buying process starts with a slimmer request for proposal.

"I used to put together tremendously thick RFPs, with every possible question and element," said Steigerwald. "I don't have to have that any more. Now I go out looking for a vendor who already does what I want or uses tools that let me do what I want. I look at what they have, and I either accept it or go to someone else who does."

In 1998, his paper shopped for a classified system by giving sales reps workflow graphics and saying, "Look, we need a classified system, and here are several elements that we consider part of a classified system.

"Please tell us how to do that."

Not your father's database
One element our hot buyers seek is a good database, which they can pry open with standard tools.

"Four years ago it was a totally different thing you were looking for," said Perschau. Now, in its search for an enterprise-wide solution, the Star recognizes that it must have a database "that underlies everything."

The database quest is central to Media General's future, Shute said.

"I can say that more systems will be accessible across the company," he said, referring to Media General's broadcast, newspaper and cable divisions. They are eyeing data warehousing systems for content, "a single source of information, that everyone in the corporation can get what they need out of it."

It's this multimedia convergence that is steering Shute's shopping cart, and Perschau's as well. He wants web publishing to be "another edition that cascades off of what you're already doing."

One developer caught his eye by switching to eXtensible Markup Language (XML) tags for all publishing. Coupled with a "nice SQL database that you can get to from any angle you want," this could streamline the Star's book and CD-ROM publishing, electronic research sales -- and businesses still unknown.

"I think that a new database would deliver whatever the publisher wants it to do," Perschau dreamed aloud. "Who know where that's going to go?"

The impact of the Internet
All our hot buyers see their systems reaching outside their walls: Ad submission by car dealers and real estate brokers, pagination from home, television stations sharing video clips, marketing data on prospects' desks, data processing centers replacing site-by-site computer rooms.

That puts more pressure on network and hardware architecture, which must flex more and support higher in-out rates, said Norm Heath, San Diego's production systems manager. "People can't tolerate batch delays anymore."

Shute's impression is "that all or most vendors out there are incorporating web interfaces into their product lines."

Developers and in-house staff "recognize the value of having a single user interface to support and then develop around," he said. "So instead of focusing on that end, they can concentrate on the core application."

Underlying database architecture plus browser interfaces make all things possible, Steigerwald predicted. With an open database, browser and security pass, "you can do anything you want," he said, such as giving anyone entré to the general ledger systems, payroll, accounts payable and classified sales records.

Yet as suppliers specialize, focusing on a particular features set, they leave interconnectivity and network issues to the customer, Niehaus noted. So, too, with shrink-wrapped software, often fat with features that newspapers don't need.

These two matters lead to a new interest in proprietary solutions for specific tasks.

"We're changing our view. We want standard architecture, where we can buy our own computers, but we're not averse" to proprietary software that does what's needed, said Perschau. "We would like to not deal separately with software vendors who are third parties to your system. ... Like a lot of companies, you buy their shell and then you buy shrink-wrapped software, Microsoft Word, Quark (XPress), that kind of thing."

That doesn't mean everyone wants a single-supplier solution, either.

"I would look for compartmental functionality," said Keary. "The system must be open and pieces interchangeable," to the point of substituting one brand of integrated billing into a different brand of advertising system, bypassing its built-in billing module.

Ultimately, the requirements for more flexibility and openness spring from newspaperdom's customers, whose industries are retooling faster.

Pressure is coming from their desires for e-commerce, customer updating of account information, paying and collecting fees over the Internet, "all those things, they are here today, and I'm sure in our company it's inevitable," said Keary.

"We are looking at more strategic plans -- that is a big word around here," Niehaus said. "We are so used, I think in the newspaper industry, to 'what's circulation in the next quarter and what do we need to do to adjust it,' that we don't look at the long term."

That field of vision is rapidly getting broader.

"We're just afraid that some change may come down the road, in the business climate or the web climate," Perschau said.

"The newspaper has content, but ... we don't think our legacy system gives us the comfort level that we need to say we probably can react to whatever market condition we need to react to."

"Our business demands are really putting pressure on us to bring new technology in here," Steigerwald said.

While payback may not look imminent, "it may be making money 10 years from now and you can't wait to start until then. We have to spend money now to prepare for the future," he said.

-- Marion J. Love

Digital Equipment Corp., (508) 486-5986, e-mail: bovay@mkots4.enet.dec.com;
System Integrators Inc., (916) 929-9481, e-mail: sii@sii.com.

From THE COLE PAPERS, January 1999, Copyright © 1999, All Rights Reserved.