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A Blank Canvas
At MoMA, IT had fallen a bit behind. When Peltzman took over the 50-person staff, he found a department that handled systems and apps, but little else. The website didn't even fall under IT. The museum's infrastructure centered on IBM iSeries mainframes.
"I think IT was necessary but not core to the mission of the museum," Peltzman says. "We had one-off solutions solving issues without big-picture thinking."
"We looked at IT as up-front cost that might have operational savings," COO Gara adds. "We thought we'd make a capital investment and squirrel away our pennies. But we had to support the technology, which required more of an investment."
Peltzman's first decision was whether to rip and replace the museum's aging iSeries mainframes with something else. He called up former colleagues to learn more about the platform and went to IBM for an in-depth briefing to get a sense of the system's flexibility and reliability. "There was a cloud over the iSeries," Peltzman says. "The platform has a green-screen reputation."
To be sure, Frank Gillett, an analyst at Forrester Research, says major infrastructure rebuilds like MoMA's require a tradeoff between the familiarity of a closed system and greater functionality with a more open one. "The thing to get right is having stuff that works well together," he says. "If you don't, you get into all the hassles and follow-ons."
That's exactly what Peltzman was thinking when he decided that with new rapid application development tools for the iSeries from Lansa Inc., the IBM system was worth keeping. The museum's IT staff could use the tools to create a membership application and other customer-facing systems. And since the staff was familiar with the IBM platform, Peltzman wouldn't need to hire outside help.
Peltzman was also able to work out a strategic partnership with IBM -- which COO Gara estimates saved the museum millions of dollars in consultant fees and hardware costs, such as desktops -- so Big Blue could use MoMA as a flagship customer.
But before long, Peltzman realized that the IT budget he had inherited wasn't enough. "You only get one chance to do this; you can't go back and build more infrastructure," he says. "The budget didn't match the opportunity."
After six months of planning and scoping, the CIO put together a "substantially" bigger budget and gave a presentation to every department head that explained how IT could help the museum accomplish its mission. He eventually won approval from senior management.
"Everyone wanted to jump to the glitzy technology of the moment; everyone was chomping at the bit for new technology," Gara recalls. "Steve was very adamant that we get the back office up and running. We don't have the resources to support 27 different systems. Steve understood that and then brought me on board, and I got everyone else on board."
For Peltzman it came down to aligning technology with the museum's mission. "It was a business decision to say, 'I need to prioritize infrastructure and flexibility over everything else,'" he says. "You have this temptation to do really flashy, glitzy museum technology that will blow people away. But this is not a museum of technology; it's a museum of art."
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