July2012
www.tvbeurope.com
TVBEurope 17
Integration people, operations and IT at ITN
By Fergal Ringrose
AMIT PATEL, Symbox CEO and founder, introduced this case study by telling the audience that “over the last eight years we have worked with broadcast and media companies focusing on the need to understand how the business operates and the cost of the content. We can bring in expertise to manage operations and get better quality data,” said Patel. “We help to integrate the people
and the processes. Can you actually take out the people? You definitely cannot. For all the operational teams throughout a broadcaster, we have templates that can help them to data map and provide intelligence to the management team. “Operations struggle sometimes
to extract and drive that information; we can help to bring the different silos in operations together to increase efficiency, maximise resources and reduce the costs,” said Patel. “Our
clients’ common themes are around human workflow and reporting, and the processes that manage these operations. If you get this right you can start to be more agile and deliver a better quality of service.” The main case study presentation
was delivered by Steve Luck, senior team leader, ITN. “I’m responsible for the team that supports all of ITN’s IT and broadcast infrastructure,” he told the BAFTA audience. “ITN produces news for Channel 4, ITV and Channel 5. ITN Productions provides web and mobile content plus documentaries and commercials. ITN Source sells our news materials, and ITN Consulting can help you start up your own news service. “These are the business units to
which the Support team reports. Why am I here? A big question! To share ITN’s experience of business process management. “As ITN grew over the years there was an increasing awareness that
individual unit management accountants required greater detail. As the Support department we are a cost, so had to show our use to the business. Accurate direct costings; collecting data for reporting; enabling broadcast and IT equipment to be tracked; and providing engineers to the business. “We’ve journeyed from the
hand-written log-book sent by post to a manager’s desk and probably to the bin after that! Then along came PCs, and an application was written in-house — we called it the maintenance management system. It relied on the person who wrote it to make any changes, so we really needed more structure. “Our first commercial application
wasn’t very successful. It was a flat application with no process control and inputting was tedious. In the end people revolted and it generated a lot of bad feeling. So, implementing a new system to replace it was a real challenge.
Steve Luck: “If you introduce a system – and I did – don’t be autocratic about it” “And the current solution? The
choice wasn’t really made on a cost basis; it had to work for us. We made a shortlist of 10 companies, reduced it to three, and live tested all three — allowing each supplier to set up as an instant management system and put it to use for real. We ended up with Symbox. “We wanted to involve the key
stakeholders — the engineers and the key managers,” said Luck. “We wanted the input to be simple. We’ve got 10
inputs at the moment and we think that’s too many — you really don’t need the client’s inside leg measurement! We have ended up with a reporting process built around BPM and with asset management built around that. “We decided to split the quick fixes
from the problems: this enabled us to show the responses to quick fixes and we could evaluate problems so we could assess staffing levels required.
Continued on page 18
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