Over the past couple of weeks I have (as an academic exercise) been thinking about where the major IT challenges lie in the industry in which I work.
An agency doesn't really have any big business systems issues that would be faced in the finance, manufacturing or retail sectors (shh – don't tell anyone!). Our client list is short and of high value, so client relationships are high-touch, not codified into CRM. We sell services not products, so there aren't big supply chain challenges. In fact, alongside collaboration, core ERP and content creation tools, it's only really Content Management that's a thorny issue in hard IT terms.
But what a problem it is – here are some of its dimensions.
As part of my burgeoning media career(!), last week I was subjected to the embarrassed torture that is a photo shoot. I have only had to endure such things twice before (at weddings), and at both I have had the crutch of a few drinks to help with the inane grinning. The photographer, also called Matt, was a lovely chap who did his best to take my mind off of the task at hand. Chatting to him, out turned out that as a rule he was packing 16Gb of data card in his Nikon when he went out on a job.
In the pre-digital days of film, a photographer like Matt would have had some fairly straightforward economic limiters to his work. Film came in rolls of 24 or 36 exposures, cost x amount per unit, and additionally cost a further amount y to get each roll developed. In my wildest fantasies I can't imagine that I would have been worth more than 72 pictures, and would have probably been less.
These days, with the incremental cost of taking additional photos effectively zero, and no cost to develop, all bets are off. I don't know how many photos Matt took (if you are reading this, please do let me know), but it was loads. And each one was 8Mb.
So, from each shoot, a professional photographer these days is producing gigabytes of data. It's easy to forget how big a gig still is… But try uploading one on your home broadband and you will, quite s-l-o-w-l-y, remember.
Here's the first dimension of the Content Management problem – bandwidth. Not necessarily the big fat fibre connections that you can reasonably afford in major metropolitan areas these days, but the measly copper- or even wireless-based services that our staff have access to when out of the office.
The next dimension emerges once the material gets back to the studio or editorial office. I joked to Matt that, with a face like mine, how the photos would turn out was probably more down to Photoshop rather than the quantity of shots he took. Joking aside, whatever photos do get used (it's for a piece in CIO Magazine) will almost certainly go through the Adobe tool for some sort of retouching or processing. Other than during Stalin's reign in Russia, we are living in times of unprecedented image manipulation. Putting aside any political or social implications, this poses further challenge on IT infrastructure as again we see natural economic hurdles to reworking disappear in the digital world.
I heard a story last week from a retired BBC audio engineer. In the days of tape, razor blades and sticky stuff an there might be maybe two edits for a piece for a radio programme. Tape was slow and fiddly to work with, and multiple copies of things lead to degrading quality. In a digital world, where endless duplication can occur without any issues of quality, and you don't get bits of sticky tape caught up all over the place, the number of edits can run into the tens or even hundreds. And each of them needs to get stored somewhere.
So not only are we creating more raw material of higher and higher file size, but we then make more copies of it throughout the production lifecycle because we can.
In London at the moment we have 16Tb of high availability, fast data storage (provided through NetApp devices). I estimate that, all in, that device costs us around £80-£100k each year to manage. In London alone we are generating an average of 150Gb of data every week from about 200 staff and, remarkably, that EXCLUDES the really big film and 3D animation that we produce. Increasingly we use Red Camera for work, which shoots at up to 42MBytes/sec – or about a quarter of a terabyte for a 90 minute movie… compare that with the 25GB of data on a Blu Ray HD disk. But we live in a world where I can go out and buy 1Tb of hard drive storage from a high street retailer for under fifty pounds – yet delivering that space in a way that is acceptable within a company environment is incredibly more expensive.
So, we are creating exponentially vast amounts of data that we can't afford to ship or store. Technology limitations, undoubtedly, but I think also an area where there is increasing expectation from people that things should work just as cheaply as easily as consumer devices. The difference? How many people back up their iPhones? And then if your iPhone (or Android, or home computer, or Sky Plus or whatever else it is) crashes and burns, other than be a bit cross, who do you blame? And how much do they care?
Running IT services in a creative organisation is partly about being the person who cares. Unfortunately, that often means looking like we aren't able to provide what it is that everyone wants – and the simple fact is that in current models of service expectation (and particularly, to provide all of the above in a way that is 100% reliable, and cost effective as well) there is a circle that can't be squared.
What can be done? Well, it comes down, I think, to being able to articulate levels of risk, and get those who need to to make the decision. And the key point is that those decisions are not ones that can be made by the people who are tasked with provided the technology services.
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