Partnership Spotlight: Navy Pier

Starting as an opportunity to deliver print services and managed IT solutions, the partnership between Impact Networking and Navy Pier has developed into much more. We interviewed the leaders in this partnership to hear more about the success of this unique partnership.

Video Transcript: Navy Pier IT Partnership Spotlight

Chuck Sansone, Director of Technical Services at Navy Pier: My job is to oversee all of the operational IT here at Navy Pier, whether it be from making sure that all the desktops for the people that work for Navy Pier are working to the Wi-Fi that we provide to the public.

We had another vendor that we were using for our managed services that we were not super happy with at the time, so we just started looking at other options and Impact, when we started meeting with other vendors, stood out, for sure, in a way that none of the other vendors did.

Saul Corwine, MIT District Manager at Impact: I am the manager for the engineers that are stationed here full-time with Navy Pier as part of our engagement with them.

Sansone: We met initially with Impact to work on a project to upgrade our collaboration systems to Office 365. They had ideas about what we could do in the future to improve our operations in the office, people’s computers, how we can manage them better to document systems that they work with, DocuWare, to backup systems, which was something really important to us at the time. We were really looking to enhance our disaster recovery.

They have people on-site here every day for us. I know that that’s not necessarily a normal way that Impact does business, but we needed somebody to be here all the time because our property is very large and complicated.

Corwine: It was important for them to have that level of coverage, to ensure that all the systems were going to be monitored, stay up and running. How do we augment the existing IT staff here within Navy Pier and allow them to be more successful, allow them to expand the types of projects that they’re working on?
We were able to come up with a customized solution so we ensured that that handoff, that workflow, if something needs to flow back to the internal Navy Pier IT team, we’ve got a whole flowchart to map out how that works.

Sansone: And with that, they brought improvements to those systems, the backup systems, the storage systems. And they provide all those services for us every day.

Corwine: As we started looking at bringing an additional engineer in, Chuck was actually involved in the interviews. Because they’re going to be an Impact employee, but as part of that, they’re going to be at Navy Pier full time, so we coordinated with Chuck so he had an opportunity to sit and interview the prospective engineers as well. We wanted to make sure they were going to be a fit from his perspective.

Sansone: Working with Saul and Impact kind of demonstrated, you know, how concerned they were to make sure that we were getting exactly the person that we thought would fit in with the folks that already work here. To have the ability to work with them on that choice was really great.

Corwine: I know the people here at Navy Pier really well, I’ve known Chuck for a while, so for me it’s more than just maintaining that IT piece. I’ve tried to make sure that I coordinate in as much as possible with the print team and the DocuWare team, you know.

I want to try and take ownership of the relationship as much as possible to ensure that Chuck and everybody here is getting what they need.

Sansone: If we have problems at any point with any kind of small detail that I feel like needs a little bit more attention, I know I can call Saul pretty quickly and just say “We need to have another look at this,” you know, or just to say “This is going great, thanks a lot, I appreciate it.”

But he always picks up the phone, every single time.

Corwine: I just, you better call Saul! Might as well just say it, we gotta get it out.

[laughter]

Sansone: I love you, man!

[laughter]