Joel Ledlow, CEO, ScheduALL
Friends, broadcasters, terrestrial and satellite service providers… Lend me your ears. I come to bury linear workflow and islands of isolation, not to praise them.
It has been written that our media and broadcast industry is in transition. I will submit to you that this transition bears more likeness to a rebirth - Fully equipped with night sweats, panic attacks, wailing and tears as we face the glaring bright lights of the unknown.
Observing from the outside in, the imagery is more compelling wait and watch for the hard “bite down” hopes of a silver bullet and bracing for our delivery much like giving birth in the back of a 1920’s rickety pickup truck doing 100 miles per hour downhill on an economic superhighway littered with potholes and debris. Whew!
All at a time when 401ks have rapidly become 201ks, and so many of our businesses have gone beyond the proverbial high and tight financial haircut. Some of us have sacrificed entire appendages in the hopes to stop the spread of red ink or worse, been forced to undergo open heart bypass via chainsaw just to remain relevant and survive.
Our organizations have had to become flatter, faster and more focused than ever before. The sheer number of projects is on the rise, with fewer headcounts as our lusty overtures for even greater profitability, hangs in the balance
Believe it or not, I see this as our time to perform or perish! We must say goodbye to the comfort of “the way things were” and embrace faster project management, escalating client requests and thinner margins. We must look for new ways to source the best partner for the best opportunity and be able to do this in real time. We must say goodbye to passive directories, fumbled phone calls and spam blocked email strings. We deserve more and we can achieve more!
Reactive searches via even the most sacred of black books and rolodex – be gone! The media and broadcast industry must deliver more choices and suppliers MUST provide direction beyond mere feature function. The requirements today are of a much deeper understanding of the why and how as we work together to conjure the possibilities, and be damned the conventional offering of mere when, what and how many widgets would you like to buy this quarter. Trusted partnership must mean more for both parties if either is to prevail during this symbiotic dance toward the future.
We have entered an age and time where collaboration can no longer be just a conversation over coffee or whiteboard fodder. Collaboration is an imperative within this Darwinist evolution for our industry’s very survival… and this is key – The days of isolation are rudely, abruptly and violently being met with the reality of co-opetition, sharing and interoperability as we redesign our workflows and further automate the IT stack to address “in real time” the capture and distribution of content.
By the way Alice, if you haven’t read…the world’s gone digital and there is a global marketplace of ripe and ready providers eager to serve, so our looking glass aperture will need to incorporate a very wide angle lens indeed. Talent, Equipment, News trucks, Freelancers et al are readily available anywhere in the world at skill sets and price points at every level imaginable…
Now what? More on this next week – stay tuned!
