feature automation & asset management
The notion of designing a system from the ground up based on the workflow requirements of the organisation is a relatively new phenomenon, enabled in part by the maturity of workflow and media management systems now available. With the emergence of such systems, it became possible for organisations in the broadcast arena to conceive an entire system design based on the use cases of individual groups of users within the organisation. Simon Eldridge, senior product manager for Omneon - now part of Harmonic - reports.
Optimising operations through system design
B
y defining the media lifecycle and identifying the individuals or groups responsible for each workflow task,
organisations can model
themselves as content factories with production lines optimised to minimise duplication of effort and to maximise efficiency. This approach has transformed other markets, such as the auto industry, which was revolutionised half a century ago by the Toyota Production System. Within the media industry, workflow-oriented system design is critical to organisations’ successful shift toward cost-effective multiplatform content distribution. Media and workflow management systems ensure that this type of system design can be achieved without compromising best-of-breed performance across the workflow.
System design
System design traditionally has involved the selection of disparate systems that individually address specific functions: storage for
Figure 1: a high- level workflow example.
Supporting the workflow from start to finish, the Omneon platform makes it easy for organisations to benefit from the core advantage of workflow- oriented system design.
production, a server for transmission, a transcoder for format conversion. Each of these discrete systems were selected and implemented by organisations based on their capabilities as individual components. For example, in selection of an ingest server, the organisation would determine key criteria with respect to performance, format requirements, capacity required, etc. Similarly, the control application for that server would be selected according to its own criteria.
This approach may bring best-of- breed components to each broadcast facility, but it also requires complex systems integration to ensure that these components - chosen independently - work together as a cohesive system. An organisation’s workflow is determined not only by the capabilities of the selected equipment, but also by the level of integration between various components and interaction between operational teams.
Following careful analysis, planning and definition of the desired workflow, the organisation can simply insert into
the system the most appropriate functional components for each task. This is possible because the data flow and system interaction are managed by a higher-level workflow and media management system.
Workflow definition
The most critical task of system design is the comprehensive and accurate workflow analysis that must be undertaken to understand fully not only the way the organisation currently works, but also the way the facility will need to work with its new infrastructure.
Very often, an organisation will analyse the way that its facility currently operates, and then simply replicate that workflow in a new system. For example, during the transition from tape-based to file- based workflows, many organisations simply re-implemented their tape workflows, essentially replacing tape with files. Their operators still enforced single-user access to content (as with a tape), the files were moved around between file systems (just like a tape on a cart), and everything was processed in a completely linear way. This approach prevented many organisations from being able to realise the efficiency improvements that they expected to gain with this technology shift.
14 l ibe l january/february 2011 l
www.ibeweb.com
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