Rapid TV News

Tapeless Workflow: 'Scope the project right!'

Chris Forrester ©RapidTVNews | 03-08-2009

There are dozens of potential pitfalls in creating a Tapeless Workflow system and environment. A panel of industry experts delivered their to-level advice at a recent Rapid TV News Round Table on Tapeless Workflow. First up, agreed the panel, is to “really scope what the operation is all about and what they really want to do,” according to Chris Simons, VP of Harris’ automation and asset management division.

“Then, it is a process of education,” he continued. “Getting the ‘buy in’ of the people, and then working it through because you won’t get the maximum benefit if you don’t take the work force with you, and that can normally be done through education and so on and opening their eyes to what the possibilities this brings them.”

Dimitris Papavasilliou, head of Digital Workflows (European Markets) at Cisco, agreed, but added that the broadcaster (or support company) must understand the collaborative approach of the project. “It enables new ways to work and you cannot really constrain these new ways of work and this is one challenge, a big challenge, a big challenge for the infrastructure as well. How to support unpredictable workflows, things that have not been designed by some, let's say, orchestrator, because users would tend to do their own thing and the moment they have the flexibility, the ability, to do new stuff, new creative stuff, new innovations, they will do that.”

Our panel were also in agreement that today’s specification would be somewhat different from one written only 5 years ago. Bob Gentry, an associate director at specialist consultancy Marquis Consulting, admitted that today’s UGC volumes are huge compared with just a few years ago, but he said the editorial process still remained key.

“The key is the editorial process behind it so that you can take in content from anywhere. The traditional method, the cell phone, the web, UGC can come from everywhere, and it can come in phenomenal volume, very true, but the editorial process needs to be the same because the end product still requires journalistic integrity, and that’s the challenge, to manage the workflows, the Tapeless Workflows, around the editorial proposition.

“The technology can enable all sorts of wonderful things to the point whereby it overwhelms the ability of the team to manage the level of information coming in.  So that then requires editorial input. So the key in designing in the news case, in my opinion, would be start designing Tapeless Workflow from the editorial perspective, not from the technology perspective at all and that would be true I think particularly in the collaborative work flow domain. It’s very, very important to start with the ‘how would we like to work as a team and what do we need to achieve,’ and then the technology platforms can sit in below that.”

Read (and watch) the complete Round Table by going to:

http://roundtables.rapidtvnews.com/index.php/round-table-12-tapeless-workflow/presentation/tapeless-workflow-overview.html

© Rapid TV News 2009