HITS

HITS Panelists: Digital Disruption’s Happening Across Multiple Industries

The massive changes that are happening as a result of digital technology are being felt across multiple industries, from media and entertainment companies to the education sector, according to several executives who are leading their organizations’ efforts to meet the demands of the digital disruption.

Moderating an all-female panel at the Hollywood IT Society’s (HITS) recent “Holly-wired: Where IT and Entertainment Meet” event in Los Angeles, Ana Perez, manager of business consulting, information, media and entertainment at IT and business consulting services company Cognizant, said the “big hype” back in 2010 was around the cloud and cloud solutions. That gave way to hype around social networks and going mobile in 2012, followed by data analytics in 2014.

All of those technologies have changed the way that enterprises and people operate across industries.

This is “probably about the most challenging time for digital innovation” in the education sector, said Diane Pappas, CEO of strategic planning and digital innovation for the Los Angeles Unified School District. “We are changing from a paper-based curriculum and hard-covered books to really delivering content to students digitally and that is a massive transformation,” she said. Educational book publishers are trying to get that transformation right and “our schools are trying to get it right” also, she said.

There are, however, infrastructure issues specific to the education sector that are making it challenging to make that transformation at the same pace as other industries, she said. Students, after all, are using a wide assortment of digital devices including iPads and Chromebooks, and “we have to be able to accommodate all of that and look to the future because kids wants an exciting, really engaging experience, and they don’t want the same old thing,” she said. There are additional “issues and a lot of challenges that we see coming down the pike,” in part because some publishers are offering free content, she said.

Amazon.com, meanwhile, has created the Amazon Inspire education resource platform that allows teachers to write content for their students, she pointed out. As a result, teachers in L.A. will be able to create lesson plans that can potentially be opened up to their classrooms, their schools, their entire school district and even the entire country, she said. T

hat opens up a whole new can of worms because teachers will be able to swap lesson plans and school districts will have to study if those plans fit in with their standards, she said. Accountability and security issues are major areas of concern, she said.

“We have some very sensitive issues that we deal with that are very different than a lot of other industries,” so it “becomes that much more incumbent upon us to do this right — to get it right — because we’ve got kids we are protecting and their families,” she said.

In response, Perez said there were “a lot of similarities” between what the education sector was facing and what the media and entertainment industry faces.

Changes are happening fast and digital technology is creating new opportunities, said Sharon Braun, VP of technology solutions at Warner Bros. Warner has been dealing with new technologies as they roll out and trying to understand how to best “leverage” them for the studio, she said. To that end, it’s closely studying exactly what it’s spending money on when it comes to IT. For example, certain existing applications have been getting an increased amount of funding each year, but the company wants to make sure now if that is really warranted in each case. “We’ve changed our approach to investment,” she said, adding that it’s a “pretty radical change” from the way Warner used to operate. “We’re trying to be more agile and nimble,” she said.

For Warner, any technology used “needs to have a business benefit,” she said. “If the investment you’re making in technology looks to have a benefit to the business and may move the needle then you probably can’t go wrong,” she said.

But the new motto is to “think small,” she said, adding that the days of $50 million systems and applications projects are “behind us.” It’s become important to “find ways where we can minimize the investment going in and even have an exit strategy while we go in” so that it “can back out in a few minutes” if need be with little harm inflicted. “We can’t find out four years later after we spent the $50 million that in another six months we’re not going to want to use it anymore,” she said, drawing laughter by joking “we’ve never done that” in the past.

Lionsgate is also seeking ways to be more agile, said Renee McGinnis, its SVP of solutions information technology. Historically at the company, projects took up a lot of time and resources, with IT projects normally taking 6-12 months to complete, then there’s been testing for 3-4 months, followed by long rollouts, she said. The company is now out to “kind of put the icing on the cake with some of the user experience expectations,” she said. Users of the company’s applications would install a consumer app outside Lionsgate that can do 15 things, then wonder why their systems at work couldn’t do the same things, she said, calling that a “challenge that we’re really faced with on a regular basis.” Lionsgate’s challenges also include the fact that it has a “relatively small team” compared to other film studios, she said. “We really are trying to figure out how do we adjust and be agile and be able to answer that digital question of like ‘why can’t I get it yesterday?’ in a way that actually makes sense for our team from a support standpoint and also for our budget.”

Meanwhile, Disney’s “whole product manufacturing process has changed,” said Mary Madill, its director of enterprise data governance, a new group at the company. Content is all going direct to digital now, including the images generated by cameras and the editing process, she said, noting the company can now “change the end of a movie from one showing to the next.” Her job includes making sure that all information related to the company’s digital assets are captured. Because the manufacturing process is changing, the “whole marketing process is changing” also and a “massive amount of assets are being created,” she said.

There is, as a result, a need for metadata and effective tagging of that data, she said, adding that there has been a “total overhaul” of Disney’s digital asset management systems. For one thing, it’s important that the company can quickly tell the difference between all the different Cinderellas that exist in the Disney digital library, she said.