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What's the biggest challenge you face today?
Ed Schummer: The biggest challenge Dolby faces as a company is the proliferation of business models that are required to stay in the licensing-oriented business we're in. I run a small subsidiary of Dolby called Via Licensing Corp., which has an even more specialized model. Dolby is mostly outlicensing -- licensing our technology to others. Via is involved in administering patent pools. You receive funds from licensees all over the world and have to distribute royalties all over the world. It's a transactional challenge. Every license has a withholding tax, which is different from country to country. You have to keep track of who has what tax credit in which country. We don't have an army of accountants. We have to rely on systems. That's where Mina comes in, providing us with the infrastructure.
Mina Millett: My biggest challenge is being able to keep up with the growth. We are working on a 10-phase, three-year PeopleSoft ERP deployment plan. So far, we've done eight phases; fixed assets and supply chain management are the last two phases we haven't kicked off yet. We came off a very old manufacturing green-screen system. We've been doing a bunch of Sarbanes-Oxley compliance work at the same time.
The users are settling in and trying to learn the PeopleSoft features. We tried to keep PeopleSoft as vanilla as possible to keep up with the patches. We assumed that everyone could print an invoice. We highlighted the Dolby-unique aspects. We kept our custom preprocessor -- the application that runs the transaction before it plugs the data into the ERP system -- in front of PeopleSoft. That's moved from FoxPro to VB6, and it's being upgraded to VB.NET.
Each set of licensing terms we handle is different, and so the back-end applications are customized. For Via we're putting a secure extranet phase on the back-end system. It's a copy of Dolby's internal system.
Schummer: When I started here 28 years ago, everything was totally manual. We got a handwritten piece of paper from a licensee at the end of the quarter, and they sent us a check. To go to an environment where you can do your transactions online is dramatic. The growth of our business depends on this. The current volume of business would have been impossible without these sorts of technology backdrops.
How closely do the business and IT sides work together?
Millett: Business analysts in the user departments prioritize the IT workload. We used to get a million requests, and we couldn't figure what was important. I deal with each department head around budget time. I print up everything that's in the queue, even suggestions that don't have a business case. It's an annual check. We talk about priorities. I also ask colleagues, "What are you thinking about that's not on our radar screen? What should we be thinking of?"
Schummer: In the consumer division [where Schummer worked previously], I had a general manager who was the interface with IT. With Via it's a battle trying to get enough attention relative to Dolby, trying to get IT resources. As long as we represent a small portion of the overall income, I have to wave the flag and try to get attention. Dolby has been growing at 15%, 18%, 20% a year. Via's growing 100% a year. We could grow 100% for the next three years.
That raises some questions: Do we continue to rely on resources inside Dolby, or do we try to build our own? When do we say, "There's enough transactional differences that we need our own infrastructure"? Can our current technology setup handle those requirements? The world of licensing is changing on a daily basis. Do we have the technology and infrastructure to actually execute on that? It seems more and more frequently, we have to check back and see if [Dolby's IT] can do it.
Millett: Any business project has to be driven by the business. We just have to figure out how to do it with the resources we have. Every now and then, we get a business case, and I think, "Why would we do it this way?" And I'll talk to [the business sponsors]. We can't be successful unless someone inside the business is excited about it. We won't get anywhere on our own.
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