2008 InfoWorld CTO 25: Beach Clark, Georgia Aquarium

You could say it was a whale of a project -- lots of whales, actually. As vice president of IT in a five-person IT shop, Beach Clark had a huge challenge in getting the IT systems in place for the Georgia Aquarium in downtown Atlanta, which opened in November 2005 and features more than 100,000 animals in a dozen re-created environments. Systems for ticketing, environmental controls, animal management (feeding, medical care, and so on), and basics like accounting, CRM, and e-mail all had to be set up and deployed.

You might think that Clark could take a breather after the opening, switching to maintenance mode. But he couldn't. "It's a new business, so there's lots of change," he says, especially because an aquarium is essentially an entertainment business, meaning a key to success is being able to keep up with people's ever-changing tastes.

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To keep an ongoing sense of the customer, as well as the day-to-day realities of the systems that serve employees, Beach spends a day a month doing a "regular" job like taking tickets, being a manager on duty, or answering the phones. This helps him see areas of improvements for the systems he manages. "It's amazing the things you learn when you sit on the front lines," he says. "It never fails that I find out something I didn't know that reveals a system thing that I need to address."

And then there are the inside-IT issues that pose a real challenge for a five-person team in a specialty business. Clark outsources standard services such as e-mail and SQL databases, so his team can focus on the specialty needs. "We can't have a deep technical expertise in each area, so the team needs to focus," he says. And Clark will bring in outside consultants and developers to help do the work, directed by his team, when needed, even in those specialty areas. "You have to look at the mix of inside and outside resources."

The biggest ongoing challenge Clark faces is the system for managing the animals. "There's not a huge marketplace for aquarium applications," he deadpans. And an industry consortium effort to create a standard one is years behind schedule, with no real deployment date in sight. That's meant that Clark uses a custom app -- and expects to keep doing so for the foreseeable future. Other aquariums and zoos are in the same boat, notes, which is why he's glad that "it's a pretty collegial industry" where people will help each other out, such as by sharing process and technical expertise.

Clark may need that help soon, as the aquarium gears up to expand, adding a dolphin habitat scheduled to open in 2010.