Sony Pictures sets sights on best IT Oscar

Sony Pictures Entertainment has been getting its global IT house in order using Itil and technology from BMC Software.

The work has seen the entertainment division of Sony improve its IT processes and make its tech operations - which support the motion picture, TV and home entertainment businesses, as well as corporate functions - more efficient.

David Buckholtz, VP of planning, enterprise architecture and quality for information technology at Sony Pictures Entertainment, told silicon.com that the company started a strategic planning project for the different lines of business around four years ago but realised the IT department was also in need of attention.

"[We] started looking at how we could start linking together our own information sources and digitising our own processes, so we kicked off an IT services programme," Buckholtz said.

This, however, was easier said than done. "Before [we] could even worry about the integration, we had the first issue of getting that data in the first place, of having a system of recording and wiring those processes," he added.

In order to do this, the organisation used BMC's Remedy IT service management software to bring the data - which was mainly contained in spreadsheets and Lotus Notes databases - onto a single platform over the last 12 months.

The use of the BMC Software technology along with close compliance with Itil means IT staff and the CIOs of the various business units now have an overall view of the global IT organisation.

One of the main areas of focus has been the service desk operation which the company has consolidated globally to improve responsiveness when incidents occur.

This meant replicating service desk capability across the four regional service desks in Hong Kong, London, Los Angeles and Sao Paulo.

Each service desk was tailored for its region while also fitting into more globalised processes. "It's always a challenge to keep that globalisation in mind," Buckholtz said.

The success of this was illustrated when there was a global outage in November last year.

"Because of where we had gotten we were actually able to roll over the calls to London and they were able to pick everything up without a beat - they had all the information about the incident," Buckholtz explained.

Previously such an incident would have meant staff in the US would have been asked to stay until the problem was fixed.

Buckholtz said the main challenge of the whole project was getting IT staff used to the BMC technology. "As we got to the implementation we realised we needed to spend an appropriate time on training," he said.

The work to improve the IT operation is not finished yet. In the future Buckholtz wants to make sure the roots of IT issues are resolved more quickly and for fewer people to be involved in resolving them.