Exclusives

NEW YORK – Every media organization must have a collaborative culture in place built on a clear vision, data fluency and candor, according to data guru Thomas Stilling.

“An important part that often gets left out” of discussions about an organization’s data culture is the part “about the people,” he said July 24 during a session called “Developing a Culture Around Your Data Journey” at the Smart Content Summit East event, part of the Media & Entertainment (M&E) Day at the Microsoft Conference Center. “We talk about tools, we talk about science, we talk about beautiful spreadsheets and flows,” he said, but added: “It’s really about the people.”

The 2018 M&E Day also included Content Protection Summit East and Entertainment Production in the Cloud conference tracks, providing M&E technology teams valuable insights into the creation, production, distribution, security and analysis of content.

Common themes related to data that are commonly discussed include volume, complexity, “speed to market” and “organizational disruption,” Stilling said.

Noting that he recently asked everybody attending a meeting whose companies were being acquired or acquiring other companies and “the majority of the people raised their hand,” he told the summit: “You have complete disruption going on, which means you have people challenges, people opportunities and then you have the consequences of what happens when you don’t plan and you aren’t taking into account your journey and your culture. And that’s marketplace stumbles, that’s heroic efforts, time-consuming workflows. All of the above happen when you confront volume, complexity and this amount of change.”

In a sense, data is undergoing a “heroic journey in most of our organizations,” he said, explaining: “You’re talking about making your data do all sorts of things that it probably was never expected to do.”

He asked attendees: “How often are you in a meeting where there is suddenly a new data sort and there’s an instant need for insights? Literally from 9:01 to 9:04 in the morning, as soon as you touch the data, you’re supposed to have an insight by the end of the meeting. It happens all the time.”

Also, the data is expected by executives to “drive change” at an organization, he said, explaining: “If you walk into an organization and they’ve announced that they’ve just gotten a new tool and the tool comes up, it’s immediately going to drive organizational impact, it’s going to drive revenue, it’s going to lower cost – this is all of the promise.”

So, basically, “if data were a superhero, it has a really long cape and it has to fly and leap over buildings and do everything that it can to move the organization forward,” he said. But he added: “Maybe that’s a little bit much at first unless you’ve sort of planned around it.”

Despite the many challenges around data, which also include data often getting lost, he told attendees: “Don’t abandon hope,” “be positive,” “encourage questions,” be open, acknowledge mistakes and move on after acknowledging them. Also keep in mind that there are “multiple sources of data” within an organization, but “you’re looking for a single source of truth” from among all that data, he said.

The 2018 Media & Entertainment Day was presented by Microsoft, with sponsorship from IBM Watson Media, Amazon Web Services, IBM, LiveTiles, Microsoft Azure, NAGRA, NeuLion, Ooyala, EIDR, GrayMeta, MarkLogic, Qumulo, Avid, Cloudian, SoftServe and TiVo. The event was produced by MESA, the Content Delivery & Security Association (CDSA), the Hollywood IT Society (HITS) and the Smart Content Council.

Click here for audio of Stilling’s presentation, or click here for the presentation slide deck.