Technology in Media and Entertainment Post COVID-19
COVID-19 has clearly put enormous pressure on the economy, affecting most sectors. And the media and entertainment (M&E) sector has seen profound effects across its value chain too. Inevitably, the role of IT in the M&E sector is experiencing a watershed moment.
All Change Now!
Few effects cut across the industry while a few are more impactful to our M&E sector. Let us start by noting a significant and positive change across this workforce – the mindset towards technology adoption, experimentation and change management. For way too long, the perception was that “There’s no replacement for in-person interaction.” While this may be true to some extent, the pandemic has compelled us to think otherwise. This has accelerated the adoption of a seemingly difficult work practice of virtual office. In the last 45 days, there were more virtual meetings (on platforms such as Microsoft Teams, Zoom and Cisco WebEx) than would have happened in the two years preceding the lockdown. Albeit a forced choice, this has helped overcome the strong apprehension about ‘will technology work?’ to ‘oh yes, it works’.
Maintaining Momentum
This offers a huge opportunity for IT teams to carry the momentum forward and accelerate the process of automation and digitisation with better reception of change. A reflection on most of the not-so-successful (or failed) IT projects will attest to one common reason – change management failure. With that being reduced, the probabilities of success for future projects provide an optimistic picture.
There are quite a few memes on social media which capture this with a sense of humour, e.g.:
‘Who drove digitisation in your company? CEO, CTO or COVID-19’
It’s humorous but has a degree of truth.
Apart from collaboration platforms, which have seen a surge in subscriptions, we’ve also seen a huge surge in cloud adoption. It varies from numerous genres like hosting solutions, backups, disaster recovery solutions and so on. This forces changes in the underlying architecture, technical skills and cost of ownership as well.
Yes, COVID puts immense focus on costs, and savings are a priority. Most initiatives which help save costs are likely to get a nod of approval. This again makes the technical teams revisit the processes with a different lens – cost optimisation.
Waiting for the Merry-Go-Round to Stop
In fact, the evaluation focus changes drastically when we consider one thing which we know about the pandemic – we don’t really know much about:
- What will the lockdown period be for different countries, regions and cities?
- When will offices return to normalcy and full occupancy? Or will they?
- What could the constraints be within which this phase will be operative?
- How will the supply chain support the delivery – both inward and outward?
Effectively it presents a complex multi-variable equation to solve with a lot of assumptions. As an example, assume the network switch replacement is due in Q3 2020 and we have a complex variable equation to deal with:
aX+bY+CZ+dN = ≤ µ Network equipment replacement at optimal cost
So essentially, it might change the ways of working with working from home (WFH) being the primary method of working for short to medium term. In that case, the choice of technology and infrastructure that supports WFH will take precedence over the normal tech solutions that focused also around the office perimeter, including information security.
The tools that facilitate secure connectivity and remote support solutions will become as important as another example. Another aspect will be to monitor productivity while everyone is WFH. How do we measure and analyse employee productivity? Organisations will soon consider evaluating the same as the WFH extends beyond initial expectations.
Extend this to the larger society, and you see that contactless operations are becoming critical. Whether it’s at airports, mass transportation or other places – a new tech enabled process will be in place. That’s where the internet of things (IoT) might find a breakthrough with solutions that can make things easy.
The most influential aspect is client expectations from M&E. More and more digital focus will be apparent, making it imperative to deliver on that front. The internal applications that facilitate client delivery will start finding more usage. One example is a vault (repository) of videos and photography. While it served as a good enough reference solution, its usage is growing in the current scenario, wherein it gives an opportunity to reuse and re-purpose the valuable assets.
Workflow automation will unquestionably see a better chance of adoption. In fact, even the niche tech pieces like blockchain will find innovative applications, given the current demands on ensuring privacy and authenticity in a decentralised environment.
For a typical workplace, we already see applications being tailored around making life easy when you return to the office. Some of these might have short-term impact, but a few are likely to remain in force
Learning
Overall, even in these challenging times, we can see some serious opportunities. It also gives time to individuals to reflect on and enhance their skill sets. That brings us to another positive impact of lockdown – the learning opportunities. The availability of time and the inclination to use e-learning platforms is reflected in the growth of learning hours invested by employees while in WFH mode. If that effort is driven in a structured way, it will surely benefit organisations in not only the short and intermediate term, but even in the long term as well.
So, it’s time to accept the change and realign ourselves to maximise the benefits in this situation. The whole uncertainty also throws an opportunity for IT to be an important partner for business recovery.
