Keeping the Lights on for Millions of Visitors: The IT Turnaround at a Major Chicago Tourist Attraction

Starting as an opportunity to deliver print services and outsourced IT solutions, the partnership between Impact Networking and this iconic Chicago destination has developed much more. We interviewed the leaders behind this partnership to hear how it happened and why it stuck. 

A Property That Never Really Sleeps

Picture a property that welcomes millions of visitors a year, hosts dozens of tenant businesses, runs public Wi-Fi across acres of waterfront, and still has to make sure every employee's desktop boots up on time every morning. That's the world the Director of Technical Services of Technical Services lives in.

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

It's a deceptively enormous mandate. And for a while, it was being handled by a managed services vendor that wasn't keeping pace. 

The Breaking Point

"We had another vendor that we were using for our managed services that we were not super happy with at the time," the Director of Technical Services explained.  

So the search for something better began. And it didn't take long to find the difference. 

That first meeting wasn't a sales pitch. It was a strategy session. The stated goal was narrow — migrate the organization's collaboration systems to Office 365 — but Impact's team showed up with a much bigger picture in mind.

"They had ideas about what we could do in the future to improve our operations," the Director of Technical Services recalled, "the office, people's computers, how we can manage them better, 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." 

The Team That Wouldn't Leave

Here's where the story turns from "good vendor" to something rarer.

Most managed services engagements run remotely, with the occasional site visit. This one didn't — because it couldn't.

"They have people on-site here every day for us," the Director of Technical Services said. "I know 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."

On the Impact side, Saul Corwine, MIT District Manager, leads the engineers stationed on-site full-time. For him, the daily presence was about visibility and protecting the client's ability to grow.

"It was important for them to have that level of coverage, to ensure that all the systems were going to be monitored and stay up and running," Corwine said. "How do we augment the existing IT staff, and allow them to be more successful, allow them to expand the types of projects they're working on?"

That meant building something more deliberate than a service contract. Impact and the internal IT team mapped out exactly how work should move between them.

"We were able to come up with a customized solution," Corwine said, "so we ensured that handoff, that workflow. If something needs to flow back to the internal team, we've got a whole flowchart to map out how that works."

The payoff showed up fast, in the systems that mattered most.

"With that, they brought improvements to those systems—the backup systems, the storage systems," the Director of Technical Services said. "And they provide all those services for us every day." 

Hiring as a Two-Way Decision

As the engagement grew, so did the on-site team, and that's when the partnership showed its most human side.

When it came time to bring on another full-time engineer, Impact didn't just select a candidate and send them over. They brought the client into the room.

"As we started looking at bringing an additional engineer in, the Director of Technical Services was actually involved in the interviews," Corwine said.  

"Because they're going to be an Impact employee, but as part of that, they're going to be on-site full time. So we coordinated with him 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."

For the Director of Technical Services, that gesture said everything.

"Working with Saul and Impact demonstrated how concerned they were to make sure that we were getting exactly the person we thought would fit in with the folks that already work here," the Director of Technical Services said.  

Ownership, Not Just Uptime

Ask Corwine how he thinks about the relationship, and he doesn't reach for KPIs first.

"I know the people here really well. I've known [the Director of Technical Services] for a while," he said. "So, for me, it's more than just maintaining that IT piece. I've tried to make sure that I coordinate as much as possible with the print team and the DocuWare team.”

He added: “I want to try and take ownership of the relationship as much as possible to ensure that everybody here is getting what they need."

That ownership shows up in the smallest, most unglamorous moments. The ones that never make it into a statement of work but end up defining whether a partnership actually works.

"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," the Director of Technical Services said. "Or just to say, 'This is going great, thanks a lot, I appreciate it.'" 

The Outcome

What started as a search for a better-performing IT vendor became something more foundational: a fully staffed, on-site partnership built around the property's real operational complexity — modernized collaboration tools, a strengthened backup and disaster recovery posture, a clearly documented workflow between internal and external teams.  

And a hiring process that treated the client as a true stakeholder rather than a line item.

The technology upgrades mattered. But by both accounts, what made it work was simpler than that: a partner who showed up every day and always picked up the phone.