HITS

HITS Fall: Companies Can Boost Their Digital Workplaces with Office 365, LiveTiles Says

Many organizations have Office 365, but few of them — including in the media and entertainment (M&E) sector — are taking full advantage of it, according to David Salter, director of technology solutions and innovation at LiveTiles, who says there are ways to leverage Microsoft’s software to create a digital workplace experience that supports one’s specific requirements.

Many of us have invested in Office 365 and we’re most certainly using at least parts of it already, but most of us are probably not using it beyond the basics of email and Office, he said Oct. 3 during a breakout presentation called “How to Create an Agile Digital Workplace with Your Existing Investment in O365” at the HITS Fall event.

In the session, he provided real business use cases from M&E organizations using Office 365, along with practical examples of common challenges in the industry, and explained how they can be resolved with existing Microsoft technology.

He called the use cases “very practical applications [for] solving problems” and stressed that the “key” points are that: “Number one: It can all be done with technology that you already own for the most part” and “Number two: These solutions can be really elegant, effective [and] don’t necessarily need to take a lot of time to implement” or cost much to implement either.

Employees continue to struggle with lost productivity simply looking for information, he said, noting that takes up a whopping 25% of our time, according to a report commissioned by Citrix Systems. “That is a significant time cost,” he told attendees.

Many M&E organizations are also bogged down by inefficient manual processes and navigating too many systems, while important messages tend to get lost in the “noise” of information overload, according to LiveTiles.

Yet, simple, but elegant solutions are “a lot closer than you think,” Salter said, moving on to provide practical examples from his company’s clients in the M&E industry.

His first example was an InfoSec portal he said was dedicated to communicating the importance of information security. There are “significant costs” associated with breaches in which video is leaked, and it often happens without any malicious intent, he noted, adding it’s become mandatory for all staff to use the portal that was developed so they can better understand the risks out there. “Since this has been in place, there have been no considerable” data leaks for the organization in question, he said. Although we can’t remove all risk, we can reduce it significantly, he pointed out.

Another one of his clients developed “Simba,” a chatbot apps concierge whose user interface provides a fun and interactive approach in which the bot helps people select the right apps based on their needs, helping to solve the problem of “app options overload” in which users end up choosing nothing that is being paid for and often revert to email, according to LiveTiles. “So far, the feedback has been very good,” Salter said.

“Content is king” and organizations need to define what information matters and who will be accountable for ensuring that it’s posted and remains relevant, he went on to say. It’s also critical to focus on real user needs, not technology, according to Salter. And role-based personalization matters. A portal for everyone is a portal for nobody, so it’s important to consider the unique needs of specific user groups, attendees were told.

HITS Fall was presented by Entertainment Partners, with sponsorship by Genpact, VBI, edgescan, LiveTiles, MarkLogic, EIDR, Signiant, Cinelytic, Microsoft Azure, Richey May Technology Solutions and Comcast Technology Solutions.

The event was produced by the Media & Entertainment Services Alliance (MESA) and the Hollywood IT Society (HITS), in association with Women in Technology: Hollywood (WiTH); the Content Delivery & Security Association (CDSA); and the Smart Content Council.

Click here to download audio of the presentation. Click here to download the slide deck.