Times Mirror Corporation: Information Services Consolidation

3/1/2000

Scenario
Times Mirror Corporation, a national publisher of daily and weekly newspapers, owned five speciality publishing companies ranging from legal and medical publications to a dynamic magazine group. Each of these businesses needed 7x24x375 IS operations, but none of the businesses had the resources to expand IS operations. Previous efforts to centralize IS, costing millions of dollars, had failed.

Company Profile
Time Mirror Corporation is a diversified, multimedia publishing company. Most known for its newspapers, including The Los Angeles Times, The Hartford Courant, The Balitmore Sun, and others, Times Mirror also publishes an extensive number of weekly and speciality publications.

Results
Using End-to-End Service Management Models along with business and financial modelling tools, Horizon helped Times Mirror execute a more creative, effective solution. Rather than another attempt at centralization, Horizon proposed and implemented a distributed model for Information Services across the organizations.

Identifying each organization's core strengths, Horizon distributed key IS services -- Network, Data Center, and User Support -- to the company best able to provide each service to the group, with a lean management group to coordinate planning, execution, and funding.

The results: Business units received the IS services needed with immediate cost savings; Times Mirror recognized a positive return on investmenent in under 12 months.

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