The past few months have been tumultuous for Life Time Fitness. The rollout of its Member Management System (MMS) coincided with the naming of a new chief financial officer, executive vice president of human resources and executive vice president of marketing. Soon a chief operating officer will join the corporate team. These leadership changes are rippling through virtually every department, and IT's priorities are changing rapidly.
To ensure alignment between IT and the business units, the company established two steering committees early this year. The executive IT steering committee consists of the CEO, CFO, CIO and corporate executive vice presidents, a total of eight people. The IT steering committee comprises technology managers from all the IT groups: application development, network operations, telecommunications, helpdesk and Apple Macintosh network operations (for the systems used in Life Time's child-care centers).
The executive committee prioritizes IT projects according to corporate goals. It meets weekly for about an hour, and CIO Brent Zempel provides updates on big IT projects already in progress. In longer meetings about once per month, Zempel presents ideas for new projects, and the committee gives a thumbs-up or thumbs-down.
Before the committee was established, project planning was an ad hoc exercise, and it was difficult to prioritize requests coming from the business units, according to Zempel. "The executive vice presidents of each division are vying for attention of their respective problems," he says. "Now you have people who are looking at the entire enterprise and making decisions. They don't have a [territorial] agenda."
The IT steering committee meets two or more times a week, and IT staffers rotate in and out periodically. This group analyzes the IT priorities expressed by the executive committee and recommends point technologies and broader platform changes based on those priorities.
"The IT committee will say, this is the infrastructure we already have in place. Looking at the priorities of this year, should we move to a hub and spoke architecture, should we use a Microsoft platform, and so on," Zempel says.
On Location with Life Time
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The idea for the committees sprung from an evaluation in late 2001. Zempel's peers asked him for a clearer explanation of how technology ties into their business agendas. "It was a very strong sentiment," he says.
The committee meetings are, by design, boxing matches. "We put the gloves on in there," Zempel says. If someone from the network operations team wants to suggest a better way for the telecom people to handle a process, he or she is invited to make the idea known. Zempel, whose work experience leans more toward sales and gym operations than technology, uses the open-mike sessions to form his own opinions about where the IT organization should go.
Says Zempel, "The whole thing is an educational process for me."
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