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The Making of a Miami Dolphins Technology Leader |
Tery Howard was born only 200 miles from the Miami Dolphins Stadium, but it might as well have been a world away. Her birthplace was the postrevolutionary Cuba of 1960. When she was 4 years old, her family moved to Spain. Her father had been an accountant before Fidel Castro's war, and her mother a teacher. When they left Cuba, they had to start over. In Spain, her father drove a cab.
After a few years there, the family moved to New Jersey and eventually to Florida. Howard went to Florida International University in Miami and planned on becoming a teacher like her mother. A counselor suggested that she take a computer science course. "I loved it," she says. "The details, the ability to create and see results; that was it. I never thought about teaching again."
After graduation, Howard was hired by the Miami-based cruise line Carnival Corp., which was switching from a mainframe system to a PC network and installing computers throughout its fleet. Howard developed solutions for beaming boarding manifests to customs officials before docking, which replaced paper lists. Another of her projects was creating an online debit card system to replace vouchers and allow real-time sales reporting. She also automated the ship's dinner-seating system, which had previously been scrawled in pencil by someone who manually sorted smokers, newlyweds and the like and placed them at compatible tables. After 15 years at Carnival, Howard had 150 people reporting to her.
In 1999, she jumped ship and joined the Dolphins, drawn by a mandate from management to reinvent how the team used technology. "Senior management said, 'We need to invest in technology,'" she recalls. "This was a great challenge, starting from scratch and building my team."
--M.Y.
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Assisting the Business End
But recruiting and taking care of players is only part of the team's challenge. Dolphins Enterprises also owns the stadium where the team plays eight regular-season games a
year (it is also the home of the Florida Marlins). Filling those seats is a major priority and a major source of revenue. Ticketmaster handles most of the sales, and for years the Dolphins cobbled together data from up to half a dozen weekly reports, creating a spreadsheet for management to track sales. Howard decided that applying business intelligence (BI) software would be a better idea; she wanted a program that would automatically aggregate all the disparate sales data, creating daily reports that would be e-mailed to management. She picked Hyperion's BI software tools, which were installed by a consulting partner and went live in time for the 2002-2003 season. Now, when sales slacken, the marketing department uses purchasing history to target fan clubs and other groups.
"We introduced a lot of automation for the financial side and migrated our legacy systems," says Howard. "We try to make the software fit the business needs. The less we customize, the better for upgrades. There's a team that developed its own ticketing system. What advantage can you get from it? The intellectual asset is our data. Our focus is on the core. Everything is critical, but the core element is what gives us a competitive advantage. The NFL has very sophisticated analytics. The key to our competitiveness is what we do with that data."
This year the Dolphins went live with Hyperion's CRM product. Though this is standard software fare in many industries, fewer than half the teams in the NFL have implemented such systems. Together, the various deployments have streamlined operations and freed up several employees for other tasks. Now sales and marketing folks no longer spend their time gathering numbers and manually plugging them into spreadsheets. Still, Howard adds that the sales team, whose job is to fill seats, did not rush to embrace the CRM system. "It's been tough for sales, but you can't force it. The challenge is to educate [sales and marketing people] to understand the potential for technology. Communicating in a language that your team can understand is key."
Down the Field
While the team tries to battle its way back to victory this
season, Howard's IT department is quietly working on back-office strategy. Her current projects include developing
a scorecard portal so management can look at the pulse of the organization at a glance and testing a VoIP prototype to replace the team's aging PBX telephone system. "I prototype everything," she says. "We try to have a structured approach. We're small, but we follow a methodology."
Howard's boss expects her to keep pushing the bounds of technology as well, especially since the company recently announced that it will spend $425 million to transform its aging stadium into a year-round entertainment hub with restaurants, retail space, offices and a hotel. In addition, the corporate office will be relocated to the 268-acre site. "Technology hasn't even scratched the surface," Bailey observes.
The director of IT sums up her challenges this way: "It's a small organization, but our needs are the same as a larger enterprise."
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