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How easy is it for large, broad scope projects to deliver actual business value?

It’s a fact that our industry is littered with quietly, and not so quietly, abandoned big technology projects. Trade shows and networking events are frequently awash with talk of delays, cancellations and scope contractions for contracts that once grabbed the headlines. This begs the question: Has the industry lost sight of the importance of value? And how long is too long to wait for your technology initiatives to deliver tangible value to your organisation?  

Here at Blue Lucy we are used to implementing integration projects at scale, and although we have some battle scars to prove it, we’ve learned a thing or two about delivering value along the way. We’ve put together 6 key strategies to mitigate the risks associated with large projects, and the first one is all about scope:

• Don’t boil, slice:
  No, it’s not a cooking tip. It’s a technology and delivery approach that combines to allow projects to be implemented on the basis of the horizonal or vertical operational slice model. Here the supplier and management team work together to prove an end-to-end, or top-to-bottom operational capability that delivers value quickly. The project then continues on this operational slicing model with the next capability . The hackneyed phase “don’t boil the ocean” is overused, but it fits here. We believe it’s incremental slicing that delivers.

When it comes to technology fundamentals, there is a stand-out model which has proven to be revolutionary in terms of faster development times, ease of deployment and ongoing business agility:

• No-Code / Low-Code Development:
  You want to trial and test new operational pipelines and workflows, but you don’t want to wrestle with scripts or build a software development operation (Dev’ Op’).  You know there’s risk in developing and maintaining any software, even apparently simple scripts. You need to keep an eye on what’s right for the business and that includes reducing future liability. Working with no-code technology, your business analysts can build complex operational pipelines from a range of  microservices without requiring any software development knowledge. It’s simple, it’s fast, its adaptable, and proven.

We’re in the midst of a media consumption revolution, and it’s key for media companies to exploit this effectively and quickly. Hoping that significant technology decisions will pay dividends when a major project completes two years hence is not a strategy, it’s a gamble. The project needs to be seen to be delivering as it unfolds:

• Iterative Implementation:
  Iterative Implementations demonstrate earned value, and this approach delivers feedback at every stage of the project, including visibility of the effects of modifications, and the opportunity to refocus when things change, or go wrong. Your operational business needs are many, complex and evolving.  So choose a technology and vendor that enables a collaborative step-by-step approach. This in turn realises business value for you incrementally and at speed.

When you have to manage business requirements from multiple stakeholders your technology choices become crucial:

• Future-Ready Tech:
  Dig into the design philosophy of your technology candidates. Do they enable your vendors to deliver, evolve and support a solution that will keep delivering value to your business over the long term? Making the right choices at this stage of your project will empower you to tackle new business challenges and integrate with emerging technologies, ensuring long-term success for your business and a technical solution that stays relevant.

To be far reaching and impactful, your project doesn’t have to incur pointless expense deploying all new solutions or to start from a ‘clean slate’. Why eradicate successful workflows, or replace fully operational solutions that are still delivering great value?:

• Integrate, don’t deprecate:
  A modern, flexible platform will allow a media technology operation to be updated like Trigger’s Broom or, for the well-read, The Ship of Theseus. If you select a solution with hundreds of integration connectors for modern and legacy media platforms, you can keep the cost and disruption of implementations and iterations to a minimum.  The overall operation can be continuously updated with minimal impact and cost risk.

The days are over when the executive would sponsor a big-bang multi-year project for which the ROI was years in the future. So, how do you effect change? Prioritise value, focus on relieving operational pains or making business gains, and work with a team that is as focussed on the value outcomes as you are. For our final point, it’s all about focussing on what counts:

• Focus on the Value:
  In complex integration projects, it’s the project team that makes the difference between ‘good enough’ and ‘exceptional’. Great technology choices turn into outstanding deployments when the engineers are focused on getting you results, right from the start of the implementation. Work with a vendor who is focused on the difference their software can make to your operation. With joint focus, a shared vision, and a proactive approach, you’ll be able to derive value right from the outset. 

In summary, here at Blue Lucy Towers we firmly believe that it should not be necessary to have to write any software to get value from a content management / supply platform, and that any such platform absolutely should be able to deliver end-to-end business value in less than six weeks. Try iterative strategies, move away from a waterfall approach, and focus on value. If you don’t, the outcome might be a solution that simply fixes yesterday’s problems, but not until tomorrow.

According to Time Magazine, more than half the world’s population will go to the polls in 2024. The fact that the UK’s election also coincides with Independence Day presented an irresistible opportunity for Blue Lucy’s chief strategy officer, Jonathan Lunness, to share some thoughts around change, independence and choosing the technology you entrust with your media workflows:

Over the last few months, I’ve attended a series of industry events – from MPTS to Amagi’s AI conference, the DPP media supply chain festival and Henry Stewart’s DAM Europe 2024 conference – and sat through more than my fair share of product and customer presentations.  It’s been interesting to hear a broad range of customers talking about all the changes their organisations are undergoing: migrating to the cloud, launching FAST channels, growing audience share and those other important shares – the ones that relate to their stock price.  If there’s one thing COVID taught us, it’s that we don’t know what’s around the corner –what’s right for today’s situation isn’t necessarily going to be best option for the future. As an example, we collect metrics on how many times our customers change or tweak a workflow in BLAM. Over the course of delivering millions of assets, they also make hundreds of iterative changes to their workflows. And these changes aren’t to correct errors in the system – they’re in response to constantly changing requirements as they deliver new formats to new platforms. Fortunately, BLAM is a low-code/no-code orchestration engine, so it’s easy to make these changes. But imagine if each change meant filling in a change request, coding or scripting the new workflow and testing each iteration before deploying it…oh, and maintaining that code, at your cost, for the lifetime of the platform. Long deployment cycles, inflexible solutions, and changing customer requirements are not a recipe for success.

Another observation from attending these events is just how diverse the various customer approaches can be. Some are looking to support hybrid operation, others for variations in cloud provider, but everyone is looking for a mix of integrations with a diverse range of technology vendors that meet their unique business needs. Clearly there’s no point adopting a new MAM or Content Supply Chain solution if it means giving up your independence of choice – it’s not flexible if you’re locked into certain vendors because of walled garden ecosystems. That off-the-peg MAM with simple functions and $100 dollar per month seat pricing might meet your base requirements on day one, but what happens if the project is a success, and you want the whole company on the platform? Equally, is that vendor really going to be interested in building the 3rd party integrations and custom workflows you will inevitably need?

Walled gardens, it seems, are not just on the ground and some solutions are also tied to specific cloud vendors. An interesting aspect of attending such a range of events was to listen to international customers, and how the engagement and economics of cloud vendor choice differed between geographic regions. Clearly, in not following the herd, these customers are seeing different benefits to others. Ensuring your choice of MAM is independent i.e. not dependent on a single cloud vendor seems like sound advice.

As we head to the polls this year, it’s important to remember that all candidates are telling us what we want to hear. We need to do our own research, read those manifestos, and choose the right party for our own specific needs. In choosing a MAM or Content Supply Chain solution you should take similar precautions. Unlike a government however, with the right platform you can easily change direction mid-term and cope with unexpected global events – without running up the national debt. Choose wisely.

Want to find out more about BLAM?  Get in touch with our team to book a demo.

I was quite pleased to be asked recently by a Canadian colleague what our “theme” would be for the upcoming IBC. For me, theme reflects the ethos of the Blue Lucy approach to trade shows, we don’t tend to talk about product features or the specific capabilities in our roadmap.

Development of features and connectors is just something we do in pursuit of delivering customer value. If an operator needs a connector to a system or service, we will build it into a microservice BLidget – which we’ve been producing at a rate of two a week for five-years.  Listing 450+ BLidgets or detailing our CORE or UI functions in a tradeshow press-release doesn’t convey the value of our BLAM platform or approach.  We prefer to showcase business-focused solutions, which tend to follow a theme that relates to industry business needs at that time.

Forecasting Cloud

Some will remember our cloud stand at IBC 2018 – it was very popular with the crowd, particularly after the show closed.  At that time, we were about 18-months into the development of BLAM-3 and around a year out from the completion of the first customer implementations with PLAZA Media and Off the Fence.  Our 2018 IBC cloud stand was a little tongue-in-cheek, highlighting the paradox of demonstrating a cloud-based platform from a dark hall in the Rai. Then (three years on from AWS’s acquisition of Elemental) the media and broadcast industry was finally beginning to appreciate the functional power and flexibility of cloud services.  The trend – and our IBC 2018 theme – was very much about “cloud migration” which we thought was inexorable, hence the stand design – the cloud is now, and Blue Lucy is there, ready.

But the BLAM platform was actually designed to be completely infrastructure agnostic – so it can be deployed in any cloud, or on-prem, infrastructure.  This is a core tenet of the architecture, although we forecast that the vast majority of deployments would run in cloud infrastructure.  Five years on, we are surprised as to how deployments have manifested.

A Mixed Reality

Eighty percent of our customer base is operating cloud-ground “hybrid” BLAMs.  These systems tend to have the core services of the databases and the application interface together with one or more workflow runners (the microservice orchestrators) running in cloud infrastructure, typically provisioned by Blue Lucy as a managed service.  In addition, workflow runners are deployed on-prem’ at the operator facility.  These manage on-prem storage, LTO libraries and other resources such as rights management systems, transcoders, file-based QC tools, edit systems (Avid and Adobe) as well as baseband recording and playout systems.

In hindsight, it was unwise for the industry to assume that the entire production and distribution capability would move to the cloud over a few short years. In many cases, it just doesn’t make sense: operators do not wish to move away from on-prem tools that are providing business value, and that are still being amortised.  For distributors, the concept of forklifting their inventory, which may extend to many petabytes, to cloud storage doesn’t make economic sense. Using the cloud for distribution, particularly to FAST or OTT platforms is very common and workflows that utilise cloud services are extremely efficient. BLAM operators are using these pipelines for content distribution to fulfil content sales – this model of ‘leaving material where it is until it’s needed or can be monetised’ – is common.  Equally, we have a number of customers who operate with all browse material in cloud storage, but delivery is fulfilled from cloud or ground – based on which is the most cost-effective overall. Naturally that logic is built into the BLAM workflows.

IBC Theme

There are many and varied reasons why media operators cannot, or do not want to go all in for the cloud or why they wish to control the migration. So, it is ground-cloud, hybrid workflows which will form the basis of our theme for IBC2023 where we’ll showcase how Blue Lucy customers are harmonising on-prem systems and cloud services and applications to create highly efficient and cost-effective media workflows with BLAM. In short, we’ll be bringing the cloud to earth at IBC2023.

I plan to revisit this topic in more detail in the run up to the event but in the meantime do make an appointment to meet with us at the show. We are keen to talk on the basis of operational outcomes, we can work out the most cost-effective place to run the workload later, and even change our mind.  We are at stand 6.C29.