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A Temporary Test Bed
On May 21, 2002, MoMA shut down its 53rd Street galleries for renovation and opened a temporary location in a former staple factory in Queens. The IT staff relocated to a small, temporary data center a block from the old Midtown museum.
Over the next two years, Peltzman and his team used the site in Queens as a proving ground for several new systems that the museum developed in-house: a membership application, a point-of-sale (POS) system and bar-code scanning.
"You never have a second chance at a first impression," Gara says. "The first thing you touch at the museum is [customer-facing] technology: getting tickets, buying something at the cash register. We have more than 2 million visitors a year, and the efficiency of getting people in and out depends on technology."
Recruiting and retaining members is crucial to the museum's business. Members pay $75 a year to join (versus $20 for a single visit) and get early access to exhibits and discounts in the gift shop. The new membership app allowed people to join instantly at kiosks in the lobby and print out a member card on the spot. The POS system linked five retail locations with the membership database. Windows-based PCs with bar-code scanners replaced a decade-old DOS system.
Rolling out the new systems in Queens meant that the museum could debug the apps before moving them to Midtown (although Peltzman says that the time frame allowed for less testing than he would have liked). In 2004 the IT staff moved into a state-of-the-art data center back at 53rd Street. It was the first department to return to the renovated museum.
In redesigning MoMA's infrastructure, Peltzman's benchmark was corporate America, not cultural America. "I don't pay that much attention to what other museums are doing," Peltzman says. "I couldn't care less what the Metropolitan Museum does. I care more what JP Morgan does. We run our network like a financial company, not like a museum. This museum is 24/7; the Web is more important than ever."
In November 2004, the museum re-opened. Twenty thousand visitors showed up the first day, along with media from around the world. The night before was a sleepless one for Peltzman. "The systems will never be as stressed as they were the day we opened," he says. "That kept me up at night. My heart was racing. If I had any hair before, I didn't after."
As it turned out, Operation Opening Day came off with military precision. IT staffers armed with radios and deployed around the building ensured that the average response time was about a minute, whether the problem was a jammed printer or a frozen scanner.
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