Q&A: IT is a moving target for Six Flags CIO

Computerworld - With 20 parks and nearly $1 billion in sales, Six Flags is the second-largest amusement park operator in the world. Since coming to Six Flags as part of a management reorganization two years ago, CIO Michael Israel has overseen a bottom-up rebuilding of the IT architecture in the parks and in the company's data center, which moved from New York to Dallas. Israel describes the amusement park business as a shopping mall with rides. Spend per attendee is everything," he says.

How is the role of amusement park CIO the same as -- and different from -- any other CIO position? The IT operations at Six Flags are a bit different in that there's a lot more operations involved here. We don't have a lot of that knowledge at the park level [because] we are a seasonal business. We are thin-staffed during the off-season, and there are times where the business is stretched in terms of people and operations knowledge. There are times when I'll be sitting in a park looking at how things are being done so I can get a better understanding of how we can reinvent that process.

What is your biggest challenge? We're dealing with an outdoor environment. So something as simple as [wanting] another point-of-sale terminal in this location means that you're digging up the ground, laying conduit, laying cabling -- and your cost to get to that location is very high.

This environment is changing; it moves. New rides go up each year; retail stands get moved. Combine that with the fact that it is a seasonal business, and you have to take everything apart at the end of the year and put it back together on a very finite schedule.

Dossier

Name: Michael Israel

Title: CIO

Company: Six Flags Inc.

Location: New York

Favorite technology: NetApp filers. "The software and functionality make our lives so much easier."

Favorite amusement park ride: "El Toro roller coaster at Six Flags Great Adventure. People-watching is also hilarious."

Philosophy in a nutshell: "If you are not the lead dog, the view never changes!"

Favorite vices: New York-style pizza and Starbucks' Shaken Iced Tea Lemonade

Ask him to do anything but: "Travel through Chicago's O'Hare [airport]."

Last book read: Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig, by Jonathan Eig (Simon and Schuster, 2006)

How has the IT infrastructure changed since you joined Six Flags? We've completely recabled our parks and laid new fiber. Everything is standardized. The data centers have been rebuilt with new cabling [and] new core switching, and the computer systems have been re-architected. About 70% of the point-of-sale terminals have been migrated to HP, and we're working on the balance. We have about 3,200 POS systems and about 3,000 PCs in the network, and about 400 servers. We have Windows/SQL databases.